Category: Features

Editorial Assistant Evan Jurmain’s interview with Winter 2023 contributor Kyra Smith on her story "Shiver"

Editorial Assistant Evan Jurmain’s Interview with Spring 2023 Issue Contributor Chelsea Peters

For the 52nd time Biblioasis has bestowed to readers a Best Canadian Stories for our edification and pleasure. Comprising 15 stories and available at $22.95 (or about a buck-fifty a story-pop), it is, at the risk of pre-empting the rest of this review, almost certainly worth your cash and the armchair-time to imbibe.

 

Rosie Leggott: Your bio reads, “She believes art contains the possibility of healing.” Has art had a healing effect on you? Was this part of your goal with this poem? Can you elaborate on the healing qualities within your work?  

 

Moni Brar: Poetry has been an integral part of my healing journey.

 

Rosie Leggott: Do you write all of your poems based on personal experience, or do you ever draw on the experiences of others that you are passionate about? When do you know that you will write about something?

Welcome to the Spring 2023 issue of The Fiddlehead. We are thrilled to congratulate Moni Brar, winner of the 33rd Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize for Best Poem! We’re grateful to our contest readers, Evan Jurmain and Rosie Legott, as well as to our three contest judges: Michael Prior, shalan joudry, and Dominique Béchard.

Yejide Kilanko’s latest novel, A Good Name, is a page-turner written in simple, unadorned prose. The novel moves linearly through short chapters without flashback and is so compelling that, for this reader, the writing all but disappears. The story takes on new urgency around a third of the way in, when, after her wedding, an arranged marriage, in the Nigerian village of Oji, 18-year-old Zina travels to Houston, Texas, to join her husband, Eziafa. At first, Zina is excited by the prospect of life in America. Eziafa, 37, originally from Oji, has lived in the U.S.

Who hasn’t wanted to be the fly on the wall of a therapist’s office? To hear the secrets people pay others to know? Jill Frayne’s Why I’m Here is a novel set in Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1995 and tells the story of Helen Cotillard, a counsellor who works at the only counselling agency in the Territory. Out of necessity, Helen “took all comers” in her practice. Her new client, Gale, is a scrappy and unhappy adolescent from Cobalt, Ontario, who is brought to therapy by her stepmother.

More than a decade ago, Alexander MacLeod showed unusual patience with his debut short story collection, Light Lifting. Patience in his delivery, care in his craft. Not a word out of place, some would say. The collection itself was the result of more than a decade of story writing and publishing one at a time in literary journals.

What is the source of joy we find in poetry? That thing that caused the prickle of A.E.