Welcome to the spring issue of The Fiddlehead, which features Jaeyun Yoo’s Ralph Gustafson Prize-winning poem, “have you seen my father.” Congratulations, Jaeyun! And congratulations to everyone who took the risk of sending their work into the contest. Big thanks to Kirby, Sadiqa de Meijer and Rebecca Salazar for their work as judges of the shortlisted poems. Sadiqa describes the winning poem as “a portrait of a father who is easily overlooked by others, created through an aggregate of astutely observed images.” Rebecca also comments on the “vivid imaginings of different versions of the speaker’s father” and notes that the poet’s language “turns the ordinariness of these many possible and/or simultaneous lives into tangible urban fairy tales that fade into one another, multiple men coalescing in the figure of the unnamed, sometimes seen or unseen father.” For Kirby, the poem is quite simply “a stunner.”
Themes often emerge organically within our issues, and Jaeyun’s poem is not the only piece to feature a father — the issue is full of parents, beloved or problematic or both. There’s Sadie McCarney’s dance class dad, Adèle Barclay’s guitarist dad, “Sig” in Michael Caleb Tasker’s “Cracked Bells.” There’s Guillas’ “little mother,” Laura Wershler’s CNF ode to her mothercome-nurse, and, at a slant, Clea Young’s “In Loco Parentis.” Of course, this isn’t all the issue has to offer — as usual, it’s a potluck, and there are many ways of getting lucky (in the literary sense!).
For those of you who are interested in trying your luck through our creative nonfiction contest, our judge this year is Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of the newly-released The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been and Following the River: Traces of Red River Women, an award-winning historical account of the lives of her Indigenous grandmothers. The closing date is June 3!
Wishing you the best of luck in all your endeavours, both on and off the page.
