Category: Features

Our winter issue carries both reasons to celebrate and reasons for sadness. It’s in sadness that I share with you the passing of Dr. Robert “Bob” Gibbs, a writer and scholar who among his various contributions to literary life, was editor (1971–73) and poetry editor (1967–95) of The Fiddlehead. Dr. Roger Ploude, Bob’s colleague at the University of New Brunswick and another of our past editors, remembers Bob as “unfailingly kind to me and all others whose lives he touched.

Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Petra Chambers whose three poems appear in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Miriam Richer: All three of your poems, in one sense or another, are about the speaker’s relationship to the past—revisiting a childhood home, reminiscing about adolescence, identifying with a rescue animal’s inscrutable history. How does the passage of time figure into your poetry? 

Petra Chambers: I love thinking about time. 

Editorial Assistant Laura Broadbent Interviews Nancy Huggett whose story "I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all." won our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and was published in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Laura Broadbent: On the liberating constraint of genre: What constraints does creative nonfiction afford you to speak in ways you otherwise couldn’t?  

Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Margaret Watson whose story "The Returning Wife" appeared in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Miriam Richer: “The Returning Wife” is such a psychologically complex story. I can’t imagine the narrative without a character like Rosemary at its centre, and yet the plot is—at least according to your taxi driver—all too common. Which came to you first: the protagonist, or the scenario?

Words in search of a body: Matthew Walsh’s sophomore turn in Terrarium.

Terrarium, Matthew Walsh. Goose Lane Editions, 2024.

thom vernon invites readers to meet sex and death

I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley, thom vernon. Guernica Editions, 2024.

Wildly audacious. Hilarious yet devastating. Punchy and raw. I’ve never read a novel like thom vernon’s I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley. As a novelist, vernon breaks all the rules because he knows them. It’s why the story leaps off the page. This novel begs to be a film, and I shouldn’t be surprised considering vernon’s backstory of being an actor-turned-writer.

I am a good mother.

Reckoning and Reclaiming

Your Body Was Made For This, Debbie Bateman, Ronsdale Press, 2023.

Vancouver Island writer Debbie Bateman’s first collection of short stories, Your Body Was Made for This, follows in the tradition of Margaret Laurence’s unforgettable Hagar Shipley and Sharon Butala’s older women protagonists. Midlife presents an opportunity for the characters to reckon with and reclaim their lives, and Bateman’s collection of linked short stories explores older women’s experiences of their own bodies and their relationships.

A poet glimpses his soul and mortality: ‘Please return my life of tender purpose to its memory’

In The Capital City of Autumn, Tim Bowling. Wolsak and Wynn, 2024.

Welcome to issue 300 — those double zeros are so satisfying to write. And they represent an enormous collective effort. I think back to all the people who have furthered the life of The Fiddlehead over the years, and I’m grateful to everyone who has pitched in time, money, words, ideas, skills, care. I’m especially grateful to the host of volunteers who have sustained the journal. In particular I thank Sabine Campbell, who volunteered for many years as our reviews editor after retiring as managing editor and who has contributed greatly to The Fiddlehead in both these roles.