Editorial Assistant Anastasios Mihalopoulos' Interview with Adèle Barclay, previous winner of The Fiddlehead 2022 Fiction Contest, whose Creative Nonfiction Story "Cobra Blue Mustang Strat" was published in Issue 298 (Winter 2024) on art as a way to survive, fallibility of human memory, and how her poetry has served in her creative nonfiction practice.
If you have the opportunity, seek out Quiet, the latest collection of poems by Victoria Adukwei Bulley. Bulley lives in England but she spoke at the Vancouver Writers’ Festival last fall and I was lucky enough to hear her spellbinding voice read these strong poems—poems that stirred me with their quiet strength and their reclamation of Black history from the colonial narrative. In the poem revision, she considers new and varied answers to multiple choice tests about the colonial history of the Gold Coast.
Editorial Assistant Jamie Kitts' Interview with Jaeyun Yoo whose poem "have you seen my father" won our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and was published in Issue 299 (Spring 2024)
Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet, psychiatrist, and graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Room, Canthius, CV2, and elsewhere. She published a collaborative chapbook, Brine, with Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets.
I've been enjoying R. K. Narayan's retelling of The Mahabarata, much condensed from the full epic. It maintains the basic structure and themes, with a cheeky voice, occasionally nodding to the improbability of the events narrated. Highly recommended for anyone dipping their toes into the world of Indian epic.
Love as a Driving Force by Manahil Bandukwala
A Dream Wants Waking, Lydia Kwa. Wolsak & Wynn, 2023
Lydia Kwa’s A Dream Wants Waking promises a dreamlike narrative through its title and cover, and the short novel certainly delivers. The book opens with a list of characters from the past timeline in Tang China from 644-904 CE and the present timeline of Luoyang in 2219 CE. Told through short chapters that switch back and forth at a rapid pace, Kwa immediately immerses the reader into both timelines of the story.
