Congratulations to all the Fiddlehead authors and friends whose work has been shortlisted for 2020 Alberta Literary Awards and the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, both administered by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta to recognize the best literary works created or published in 2019 by Alberta and Edmonton authors.
A call for poets with ties to Atlantic Canada. The 2020 theme for Craft NB’s biennial exhibition is Atlantic Vernacular. This multi-genre project presents a rare opportunity for poets to participate in a high-calibre travelling exhibition that seeks to define what contemporary craft and poetry mean on the East Coast.
Congratulations to Conor Kerr, the winner of our 2019 Poetry Contest for his poem, "Amiskwaciy Nehiyawak (Beaver Hills Cree).”
Fredericton (NB) March 26, 2020 - The Fiddlehead and the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick have announced the shortlisted titles for the fifth annual New Brunswick Book Awards. The program celebrates books published in the 2019 calendar year and in three categories: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The competition is open to traditionally published and self-published authors. The awards presentation ceremony, originally planned for May 23 in Fredericton, has been postponed due to COVID-19.
Editorial Assistant Melissa Spohr Weiss interviewed Barbara Pelman about her creative process—inspiration, poetic form, and the craft of writing. Barbara Pelman’s memoir will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead.
Editorial Assistant Melissa Spohr Weiss interviewed Anna Swanson about swimming and writing, creating “found poetry” out of “garbage words,” and her mode of poetic creation that at once came out of and embodies the lived experience of physical and cognitive constraints following a serious concussion. Anna Swanson’s poem, “Portals,” will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead that will be published in spring
Editorial Assistant Melissa Spohr interviewed Susan Musgrave about her creative process, the roles of emotion, dreams, unknowing, and the subconscious, and the poet’s relationship to the poem in its becoming and ongoing revision. Three of Susan Musgrave’s poems—"More Than Seeing," "What We Do,“ and "Life in the Uncontainable World"—will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead that will be published in spring.
Photo credit: Regina Akhankina
Editorial Assistant Douglas Walbourne-Gough interviewed Sue Goyette about emergence, vulnerability, and engagement in the practices of writing and reading poetry. An excerpt from Sue Goyette's book-length poem, Anthesis, will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead that will be published in spring.
By Ross Leckie
The sacred, the profane, and the glorious mundane shimmer through Kazim Ali’s poetry. The poems are visionary in the best sense of the word. They see both the translucence and the immanence of the world, a seeing that commingles vision, remembrance, and remembering, as he puts it in “Cover Me.” “Remembrance” is the odd word out here. Unlike vision and remembering, remembrance refers to something specific, a moment of history now commemorated. For Ali vision and remembering seem to step into a ceremony of memory that is elegiac, which can be as personal as a keepsake and as social as human slaughter: the museum, the monument, and the monumental. The visionary is given a body in these poems, through sex, embrace, travel, migration, and even something as simple as walking. . . .
Paper Birch
