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Stop! Look! Listen! Melody Wilson's Television Recommendation

During the many months of quarantine, given an infinite amount of time to read and write, my husband and I binged most of Netflix. I remember very little of it. Murder mysteries blend into each other; some of them include grey shorelines of various parts of Great Britain, and others are set in grey cities of indiscriminate corruption.

Stop! Look! Listen! Catherine Owen's Book Recommendation

The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach

As an admirer of rampant kinds of poetics, I first discovered this Longenbach volume shortly after its 2004 publication and was instantly struck by its refusal to make poetry accommodating, accessible, to evidence the strain so many other poetics texts possess in their aim to convince the reader of the genre’s palatability, transparency, likeability.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Alex Boyd's Book Recommendation

I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Tazi Rodrigues' Book Recommendation

For the past two summers, I have lived at a relatively remote field station in Northwestern Ontario, which lends itself well to books I can read several times over. Flyway, by Sarah Ens, shares many of my preoccupations – prairie animals, family migration, settler relationships with stolen land – although from a different perspective than my own as Ens charts her family’s place in the Russian Mennonite diaspora and among migrating birds.

Stop! Look! Listen! Chelsea Peters' Music Recommendation

I often listen to the same album on repeat when I’m engaged in intense writing sessions – the rhythmic familiarity seems to provide the perfect level of inspiring-but-not-too-distracting background noise. The album I’ve listened to the most over the past couple of years, and that I always recommend to others, is my fellow Winnipegger, Begonia’s, Fear, which she released in 2019.

Stop! Look! Listen! Nicole Boyce's Music Recommendation

Every few years, I become fixated on an album and listen to it on repeat until my husband, children and cat are all desperate for reprieve. During the winter of 2021, Lotta Sea Lice was that album. A collaboration between speak-singing indie darlings Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett, it’s a subtle, well-crafted album that’s perfect to write to — it plods along pleasantly in the background until, one day, you realize that the songs are sneaky earworms and you never feel like listening to anything else.

Stop! Look! Listen! Conor Kerr's Book Recommendation

Was it a coincidence that Jason Purcell’s debut poetry collection Swollening arrived in the mail two hours before I tested positive for COVID19? I’d like to think that this was their way of easing me into a week of fever/hacking cough/burning throat and making things just a little bit better. I’m not a person who isolates easily. I thrive in constant companionship and surrounding myself with people who have to put up with my inane ramblings about writing. That’s where Swollening became my friend.

2023 National Magazine Awards!

We are excited to announce that two Fiddlehead contributors have been nominated for National Magazine Awards! Izza Hassan's poem "Neighborhood Haunt & Hamsas Around My Neck" which appeared in Issue 290 BIPOC Solidarities has been nominated for poetry and Shirley Harshenin's story "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" which appeared in Issue 292 has been nominated for One-of-a-Kind Storytelling.

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