Category: Features

Submissions are now open for our BIPOC Solidarities Special Issue! What conversations would you have in a room filled with fellow BIPOC writers? What stories would you write for one another that you have held back from publishing in a pervasively white literary industry? The Fiddlehead invites submissions of poetry, fiction, creative-nonfiction, and cross-genre innovations by racialized writers residing in the area known as Canada (citizenship not required). This includes writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and racialized writers who wish to push back against the BIPOC acronym.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle (she/her) is the author of Deriving, a poetry collection, and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir. She is on the board of NeWest Press, and teaches creative writing. She is a settler in Edmonton/Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Treaty 6 territory. Find her at www.jenniferdelisle.ca or @JenBDelisle. Jennifer's nonfiction piece Theory of Mind is featured in The Fiddlehead issue 287. Order your copy today!

Rabbits on the Balcony by Emma Miao is the winning poem from our 2020 Poetry Contest:

Mouth Full by Paige Lindsay

Excerpt

How many mouths have been wrapped around your forks, your spoons, and, on rare and daring occasions, your knives? Whose lips have decorated your glasses with foggy, occasionally scarlet, kisses? We have all eaten from this bowl, this simple wooden vessel. A mother, her daughter, her son and his wife, her granddaughter. It has been across the country twice and it is older than you.

We're excited to announce that Emma Miao, a poet from Vancouver, BC, is the winner of the 2020 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize! Her poem “Rabbits on the Balcony” will appear in the Spring 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead. Born in 2004, she was commended in the 2019 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, won the 2021 Frog Hollow Press Chapbook Contest, and has been published in numerous literary journals. Check out editorial assistant Eliza Ives' interview with Emma about her prize-winning poem!

Thank you again to our judges Canisia Lubrin, Jenna Albert and Adèle Barclay and to all who entered the poetry contest! 

What is your Emergency?

The Waiting Hours, Shandi Mitchell. Viking, 2019. 

This very accomplished novel is by a Maritime writer I had never run into before, although she has written another, Under This Unbroken Sky, which I intend to read now.

The Waiting Hours is about emergency workers, and the “waiting hours” of the title, is the period during the depths of the night when, if anything happens, it is usually terrible.

Secret Signature: The Quiet Revolution of Berthe Morisot

One Madder Woman, Dede Crane. Freehand Books 2020

Boundaries

Gold Rush, Claire Caldwell. Invisible Publishing 2020

Making a Difference

Reaching Mithymna, Steven Heighton. Biblioasis, 2020. 

It is not the poem which closes

A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl and Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane. Gordon Hill Press, 2020

Let’s begin with rocks and mud.

The poem “May Rocks,” which appears nearly midway through Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane’s most recent collection, begins with a single-word sentence: “Spring.” This is followed by rocks that “butt and push” in a lawn “jagged with dragon’s teeth.” It continues: