Nagmeh Phelan is a first-generation Canadian. Her work has appeared in Room, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Minola Review and was featured in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead. Find her @somesomersaults on Twitter
Remember the incapacitating “brain fog” that troubled so many of us during the COVD-19 lock-downs of 2020 and 2021?
(Maybe you don’t, because…well, brain fog. Or maybe you do, because we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and you’re still very much fogged up.)
In her introduction to Best Canadian Stories 2021, editor Diane Schoemperlen describes her own experience of “brain fog” this way:
"Although my love of reading had helped me through many crises in my life, now I found it too had mostly deserted me. [...] My concentration and attention span had dwindled to the point where I no longer had the bandwidth to read more than ten or twenty pages at a stretch. [...] I finally realized short stories could be the perfect antidote to this problem."
Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright. His poetry collections include Our Cancers, War Reporter, New Life, and Scarsdale. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. His work has been published in several issue of The Fiddlehead, most recently in issue 283 (Spring 2020). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Ivan Sullivan is a Chemistry Lecturer living and working in Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. He has written two comedy novels, both as of yet unpublished, and is currently working towards a collection of short stories. His story "Black Ice" is featured in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead.
Kevin Irie was part of Poem in Your Pocket Day 2020. His book, Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report (Frontenac House 2012), was a finalist for The Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and The Toronto Book Award. His new book is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). His poetry is featured in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead.
Patrick Grace is a queer writer in Vancouver, where he works as the managing editor of Plenitude Magazine. In 2020, his poem "A Violence" won The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for poetry. His poems are featured in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead and new work is forthcoming in Prairie Fire and EVENT.
Sam Cheuk is a Hong Kong-born Canadian poet and author of Love Figures (Insomniac Press, 2011), Deus et Machina (Baseline Press, 2017) and Postscripts from a City Burning (Palimpsest Press, 2021) on the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and its aftermath. #StandWithHongKong #香港人加油 #MilkTeaAlliance. Sam's poems are featured in issue 289 (Autumn 2021) of The Fiddlehead.
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 100 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Conjunctions to Weird Tales, as well as a number of Best Of anthologies. She has published four novels, four collections, and a novella, and has won an O. Henry award, and been a finalist for many others. Read her nonfiction essay "My Own Special Allergy" in the new Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead!
Our 2021-22 publishing intern Bailey Noiles will be sampling The Fiddlehead back issues and summarizing their contents, offering you interesting tidbits about our publishing past.
Issue 277 is the first installment. Enjoy!
Pauline Peters lives in Toronto. She has been published in anthologies and in journals such as Canadian Literature and The Antigonish Review. Her poem "Hamilton, Ontario, 1975" is featured in the new Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead. She was short-listed for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition and her chapbook The Salted Woman is being published by the British publisher Hedgespoken Press.
