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2024 Winter Issue Launch

Please join The Fiddlehead, in partnership with FROSTival, Fredericton's Annual Winter Festival, as we celebrate the launch of our 2024 Winter issue! With readings from contributors: Jody Chan, Melissa DaCosta Brown (Winner of our 2023 Fiction Contest), and Shane Neilson. There will also be a special in-person reading from UNB's 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence, Jaspreet Singh. 

Congratulations to our 2023 Fiction Contest Winner, Melissa DaCosta Brown!

We're excited to announce that Melissa DaCosta Brown is the winner of our 2023 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story "Husbands" will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH298).

Melissa DaCosta Brown is a graduate of Duke University and has a masters in Journalism from Northwestern University. She worked for MSNBC and ABC News affiliates. Her short stories have been published in Waccamaw, Subnivean, Ponder Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Lascaux Prize.

Excerpt from "Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown

Excerpt
"Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown
Winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize

The game was called Husbands. We played the year we were all thirteen and fourteen, fellow campers at the all-girls Camp Pinecrest in Louisville, Maine. Camp was a group of crumbling 1920s-built log cabins dotting a steep mountainside next to the shores of dark freezing Crystal Lake. You heard it. Crystal Lake, like in Friday the 13th, if you can believe it. And yes, the place was horrifying, but not in that way.

Chris Benjamin: A Richly Layered Study of Poverty and Trauma, Review of The Raw Light of Morning by Shelly Kawaja

The Raw Light of Morning, Shelly Kawaja’s debut novel and winner of the $12,500 BMO Winterset Award in 2022 for outstanding literary work by a Newfoundlander or Labradorian, is at the same time a compelling story of domestic violence, poverty, and trauma, and a 1990s western Newfoundland coming-of-age character study of a young woman of remarkable resilience. This is Laurel’s story, and she is 14 in the opening scene, and forced to intervene to protect her mother from life-threatening violence.

Carol Bruneau: Writing Bareback Review of World Naked Bike Ride by Lisa Fishman

Who can resist the title of this debut short fiction collection? Like cyclists in the eponymous event — a protest against fossil fuel consumption, among other things — Lisa Fishman’s 40 pieces, a collage of micro, flash fiction and narratives of greater length, flout convention. Vanity of vanities, the Pushcart Prize-nominated poet seems to say of the standard short story and its clothing/trappings.

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