Category: Features

You Don’t Want It Darker

Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray. Breakwater, 2020.

Editorial Assistant Taidgh Lynch recently spoke to Naoko Kumagai about her short-fiction piece Karafuto, which was published in The Fiddlehead No. 285 (Autumn 2020). Kumagai has been published in Room magazine, Ricepaper magazine, and Event, and was also longlisted for the CBC non-fiction prize. She lives in Toronto

Editorial Assistant Joel St. Peters recently connected with poet John Barton to discuss his poetry, the AIDS crisis, and the victimization of the queer community. 

John Barton is the current Poet Laureate of Victoria. He has published eleven books of poetry and nine chapbooks. His most recent collection of poetry—a book of sonnets entitled Lost Family: A Memoir—has just been published, his first in six years. Three pieces from this new collection, “Bathhouse Raids, Toronto, 1981,” “HIV: A History,” and “Coda for the Victims,” were featured in The Fiddlehead’s Summer 2020 issue. 

Morgan Charles' story Plagued was the winner of our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest. Recently, editorial board member William Bonfiglio spoke to Morgan about compassion, helplessness and writing during a pandemic. 

Plagued is featured in our upcoming Fall Issue 285. Click Read more for the full interview! 

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce that Morgan Charles is the winner of our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Morgan's story Plagued  will be featured in our upcoming Fall issue no. 285.  

Thank you to all who entered the creative nonfiction contest and congratulations to the fourteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Ariel Gordon!

Rebecca Givens Rolland’s creative nonfiction piece, “The Magnesium”, appears in The Fiddlehead No. 283 (Spring 2020). Editorial Assistant Taidgh Lynch conducted the following interview via email in May 2020.

Is there anyone else out there who loves a big, thick, old-fashioned novel that is written with such sparkle and fluidity that you dive right in and only come up for air at three am when your vision shuts down and your bed has become a raft on the ocean of that new world? A.S. Byatt’s Possession is one such book for me.

The Fiddlehead Editor Sue Sinclair interviewed Conor Kerr about his poem, "Amiskwaciy Nehiyawak (Beaver Hills Cree),” that won our Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and will appear in the Spring 2020 issue of The Fiddlehead (no. 283).

I just finished Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. It's a stunning gift of a book—eloquent, elegiac, hopeful. A book about how our relationship with the land and its gifts has changed, and how it might be repaired. A book for everyone. 

Best Canadian Stories 2019
Biblioasis, 2019
Edited by Caroline Adderson

Reviewed by Megan Kuklis:

"If a person had nothing but this collection of stories from which to judge the state of fiction in Canada, they would come away believing that Canadians are delightfully chaotic and completely insane...."