Category: Features

Dispatches by K Ho, 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner

Excerpt

Every morning before my online creative writing workshop, I take a black handheld device, about four inches long and one inch wide, and line it up next to my laptop. It looks like an old-school cellphone, not unlike an early-aughts Nokia mobile on which many eager hands played Snake. The device has a red button and a mouthpiece of scattered dots for soundwaves to slide through. I press record and wait for class to begin.

Creative Nonfiction Contest Editorial

11/11/19 by Sam Cheuk

Necessity is the mother of invention
but the city is running out of material.
Tho the young keep impressing,
behind a secret of umbrellas
the frontline dreams a catapult
from scaffold of bamboo stalks.

A friend, when in Romania, gushed on
about pep rallies students held
to sever blood debt, same two words
scrawled across the walls here,
minus the romance among
the Montagues & Capulets.

Melanie Bell holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her work has appeared in Cicada, Contrary Magazine, Huffington Post and other publications. She is the co-author of a nonfiction book, The Modern Enneagram, and her short story collection Dream Signs is forthcoming from Lost Fox Publishing. Her story A Limit to Growth was featured in the Summer Fiction issue of The Fiddlehead. 

Back of the road a ways

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Carol Bruneau. Vagrant Press, 2020.

Sometimes a gifted writer can convey a character by getting an absolute sense of that character’s voice. It is a peculiar kind of ventriloquism, some kind of almost hypnotic union, and when it works it is absolutely brilliant, as it is in Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Carol Bruneau.

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.

Hush, Hush, Sweet Secrets

The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins, Breakwater Books, 2020

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly

Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020

The Fiddlehead is excited to announce the finalists of our 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Chelene Knight! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced on October 1 and the winning essay will appear in the Autumn 2021 issue (289). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!

The Fiddlehead's 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest is now open for submissions and we're excited to announce that Selina Boan, Matthew Gwathmey and Susan Musgrave are the talented poets who will be judging this year's entries!