Winner of the 2023 Creative Nonfiction Prize
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice
as well as its feature.
— Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Here shall he see / No enemy / But winter and rough weather.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
We're excited to announce that Anne Marie Todkill is the winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her essay "Storm Damage" is featured in the upcoming autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.297).
Anne Marie Todkill’s story “The Makeweight Piece” won The Fiddlehead’s 2021 fiction contest and appeared in issue no. 291. Her book of poetry, Orion Sweeping (Brick Books), was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. “Storm Damage” is from a collection of essays in progress.
Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear
A few days ago – which will be many days ago by the time you read this – I watched robins, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, and a pair of swallows darting through shadows making them difficult to identify. Birds Art Life is a book I’ve read and re-read, in times of difficulty and in times of relative ease. It always brings me comfort.
I have been reading with fascination The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty. It is the story of a visionary program instituted at Boston’s Radcliffe College in 1960 that was designed to rescue select, few, women of privilege from the drudgery of American housewifery.
Forster (1879-1970) is one of my favorite novelists, and I particularly like Howards End. The film version starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter is superb, and it captures some of the subtlety of perception and insight of the novel itself. The same might be said of A Room with a View, also adapted to the screen. Forster’s work shares some similarities with Virginia Woolf’s work, particularly with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Both novelists are as much concerned with sensibility as with incidents, the building blocks of plot. Though both outlived the Edwardian age—Woolf died in 1941, Forster in 1970—and even though Woolf is commonly spoken of as a modernist, I think there is something Edwardian about both their sensibilities. Both treat emotional states and the shared opinions that typify particular social classes in particular historical periods almost as a painter would do—as colours, tones, atmospheres. Clearly both of them write with something of a poetic feeling.
George Elliott Clarke has carved a name for himself in Canada’s poetry landscape as a talented modernist paradoxically charged with verbosity. The richness of his language, the energy and directness of his address, and his exploration of “big” themes (racism, love, poverty) have garnered him understandable praise. In his best work, the focus of language and theme creates an undeniable force.
"Time Will Tell" by J Brooke
Excerpt
A Psalmist with Second Thoughts: The Poetry of Steven Heighton
Selected Poems 1983-2020, Steven Heighton. Anansi, 2021.
At least you’ll leave a shoe print . . .
Postscripts from a City Burning, Sam Cheuk. Palimpsest Press, 2021.
The Energy of Questions
I Am The Big Heart, Sarah Venart. Brick Books, 2020.
