Category: Creative Nonfiction

Excerpt from Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)
"How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor" by Shelley Pacholok
Winner of the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize

I am a good mother.

PURPOSE

To assess your readiness to write about a traumatic past event. This selfassessment quiz requires you to revisit, in manageable increments, the scene/ event/memory and the associated emotional, psychological and/or physical responses of the past incident you wish to write about.

PREPARATION

We're excited to announce that Anne Marie Todkill is the winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her essay "Storm Damage" is featured in the upcoming autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.297).

Anne Marie Todkill’s story “The Makeweight Piece” won The Fiddlehead’s 2021 fiction contest and appeared in issue no. 291. Her book of poetry, Orion Sweeping (Brick Books), was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. “Storm Damage” is from a collection of essays in progress.

Jenny Hwang is a Korean-Canadian writer and mother. She has previously worked as an immigration lawyer and in refugee resettlement with Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. She lives with her family in Mississauga, Ontario.

We're excited to announce that Jenny Hwang is the winner of our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her essay Silkworms is featured in the new Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.293).

Jenny Hwang is a Korean-Canadian writer and mother. She has previously worked as an immigration lawyer and in refugee resettlement with Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. She lives with her family in Mississauga, Ontario

Silkworms by Jenny Hwang

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Nemea by Eliis Scott

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I smelled fryer oil and my rank shoes. Hunched over in a scarlet shell seat at a Wimpy in South Kensington, I averted my eyes from the manager and nursed a small orange crush in a waxed cup, feeling the glares of casual disgust from the diners in the far corner. Hooked on Classics blared from the ceiling speaker.

Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative by Shirley Harshenin

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Tabarnacle by Ellen McGinn

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On the day, there is a darkness, raven black, on the far edge of the ocean, a soft settled line breaks the sky from the sea and the sea from the sky. Both summer blue, like twins. 

Do not start with darkness. Consider blackberry picking this afternoon. Consider a pie. The wasps going insane.

Greenland melts.

Australia is on fire.