Category: Features

By Rachel Rose

Three writers: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda, and Betsy Warland. Three different countries: Turkey, Mexico, Canada. Each writer grapples with gender and identity, with loss, with the limits of language, with persistence against the conspiracies of silence, with responding to violence as part of the quotidian, as part of civilian life. On the surface these writers appear to have little in common, and yet their answers, though written separately and thousands of miles apart, seem part of the same conversation.

Very recently, The Atlantic published “The Greatest Poet Alive: The Feral Genius of Australia’s Les Murray,” a gushing, appreciative overview of Murray’s career disguised as a review of his latest book Waiting for the Past. It is far from alone in its adoration of Murray’s distinguished career. Though he does have his detractors, and he was a major figure in Australia’s “poetry wars,” his name is regularly included on lists of potential Nobel Prize winners, and Joseph Brodsky’s claim that Murray is “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives” is oft-quoted.

What is summer in Canada but a figment of our imagination. So how better to celebrate summer than to translate summer’s haze into the tangible leaves you hold in your hands right now, though poems, perhaps, are only words in passing. Poems might wander into the woods or slip down a rank alley, but we can follow them and let them hold us for a moment. You should take them to your summer haunts. Fire escape, cottage porch, side of the road, café, diner, pub, bar, flopped on a sofa with a fan playing across your body, on the beach, by the lake, on the river bank, on a park bench.

I was thrilled to work with Katie Fewster-Yan to select poems from across the career of Mary Jo Salter. Together we debated, tussled, and celebrated over the choosing of this selection, which we hope you will enjoy.

By Robert Norsworthy

The Fiddlehead editorial assistant Robert Norsworthy interviews fiction editor Gerard Beirne about his new book of stories In a Time of Drought and Hunger.

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer living in Canada since 1997. He has published three novels, two collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award. His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London) was shortlisted for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 and selected as Book of the Year by The Daily Express Literary Editor (UK). His collection of poetry Digging My Own Grave (Dedalus Press) was runner-up in The Patrick Kavanagh Award. His short story Sightings of Bono was adapted for film featuring Bono (U2).

By Alex Carey

Brent van Staalduinen has won our 25th annual Short Fiction Prize for his story "Skinks." Brent van Staalduinen lives, works, and finds his voice in Hamilton. Saints, Unexpected, his novel of urban magical realism, will be published by Invisible Publishing in April 2016. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Sycamore Review, Prairie Fire Magazine, The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 8, The Prairie Journal, EVENT Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Litro Magazine, The Nottingham Review, Urban Graffiti, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and teaches creative writing at Redeemer University College.

By Robert Norsworthy

Michael Eden Reynolds has won our 25th annual Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem for "False Dichotomy or Monocot." Michael Eden Reynolds’ first book, Slant Room, was published by PQL in 2009. His second manuscript, Elsewhere Thought Known, has already been published in a parallel universe. Michael lives in Whitehorse where he works as a mental health/addictions counsellor.

A life has a remarkable durability and fragility. In this issue we mark the passing of Frances (Firth) Gammon, who was just short of a hundred years old at the time of her death. She attended the University of New Brunswick during the Second World War and was a member of the Bliss Carman Society, which was a group of undergraduates interested in poetry under the direction of Alfred Bailey. As a way of recording the poetry produced by their group, the members of society established a modest little journal, which they decided to call The Fiddlehead.