We're pleased to announce that Charlie Fiset's story "If I Ever See the Sun" has been longlisted for the 2016 Journey Prize! Her story appeared in last summer's Fiction issue (no. 264). Not only is this the second year in a row for Charlie, but along with Paige Cooper's "The Roar," this marks three consecutive years The Fiddlehead has two stories longlisted for the Journey Prize!
Lately I have been listening to John Cage's strangely delightful and thoughtful sonatas as performed by Boris Berman. They are very short, running between two to four minutes. There are sixteen sonatas and four interludes, so even after some twenty-five listens I still don’t feel like I can encompass the scope of the music.
We're pleased to announce that Paige Cooper's story "The Roar" has been longlisted for the 2016 Journey Prize! "The Roar" appeared in last summer's Fiction issue (no. 264).
I've had a great run of poetry reading this summer; having just begun a long-anticipated sabbatical, I'm finally getting to books that have been on my list for a long time: Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Renee Sarojini Saklikar's Children of Air India, Soraya Peerbaye's Tell. These books have heightened my growing feeling that the best contemporary poetry engages with larger issues, generally difficult ones. (That is, larger than the issue of how to write a good poem.
Introductions: Ross Leckie and Ian LeTourneau.
Poetry: Mary Jo Salter, Alyda Faber, Marlene Cookshaw, Ruth Roach Pierson, Michael Prior, Teresa Ott, Shane Neilson, Ben Ladouceur, Don McKay, Thylias Moss, Dani Couture, Cassidy McFadzean, Charles Wright, Lynn Davies, John Steffler, Gregory Scofield, Jan Zwicky, Patricia Young, Weyman Chan, Joseph Kidney, Dina Del Bucchia, Stevie Howell, and Les Murray.
Reviews: Thomas Hodd, M. Travis Lane, Susan Haley, Mark Dickinson, Shane Neilson, Triny Finlay, and Richard Kelly Kemick.
Wislawa Szymborksa’s poems in translation — both ones I first read about 20 years ago and ones recently new to me — have been satisfying me at deep levels with their mixes of the everyday and the surreally fanciful, the grieving and the humorous, the raw and the powerfully shaped. Last month I read a few of the poems to my brother-in-law in a hospital during his final week of life.
This past month I’ve been obsessing over video recordings of Van Morrison concerts, especially early performances from the 70s and 80s. This is partly because I’ve been thinking a lot about poetic pacing and what I guess I’ll call ‘rawness’ in poetry — moments of risk-taking and truth-telling, registers of feeling that create something almost textural in a poem.
Welcome to our latest Fiddlehead Radio podcast. In this podcast, we bring you a poetry reading by Robert Gibbs. Bob (as we know him) sat down with then Fiddlehead editorial assistant Greg Brown back in April 2014 to record sixteen poems selected from The Essential Robert Gibbs, published by Porcupine’s Quill in 2012, and All Things Considered, published in 2013 by Oberon Books.
Fiddlehead poetry editor Ian LeTourneau and local Fredericton poet Lynn Davies were on CBC Fredericton's Information Morning last Friday, July 8 to give their summer reading recommendations. You can listen to the podcast here.
What do you plan on reading this summer? Read something recently you'd like to recommend? Let us know in the comments!
Photo by Colleen Kitts-Goguen.
For years I’ve listened to the likes of Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Mary Gauthier, and Chris Whitley while writing, as well as a smattering of classical works, but over the past year — perhaps reflecting a spiritual or emotional change — the focus has shifted almost entirely to classical music, both traditional and contemporary. Works by people like Olafur Arnalds, Ludovico Einaudi, Anouar Brahem, Hildur Gudnadottir, Hildegard of Bingen, and Dijan Gasparyan.
