The Fiddlehead Editor Sue Sinclair interviewed Conor Kerr about his poem, "Amiskwaciy Nehiyawak (Beaver Hills Cree),” that won our Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and will appear in the Spring 2020 issue of The Fiddlehead (no. 283).
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 Rebecca Salazar
The following interview was conducted via email by Editorial Assistant and member of the Poetry Board Rebecca Salazar. Kim Trainor’s poem “Paper Birch” is the winner of The Fiddlehead’s 2019 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize.
----
Interview by Emily Skov-Nielsen, Marketing and Promotions for The Fiddlehead. Rebecca Thomas will be in Fredericton on August 25 to give a workshop "Writing Your Guts Out" from 2-4 at the Fredericton public Library and to give a reading later that evening at 7pm, also at the Fredericton Public Library. For more information, visit the Facebook event here or scroll down to see the poster.
By Corinne Shriver Wasilewski
By Jenna Albert
Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poems have recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, and Poetry is Dead, and won honourable mentions in CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2016. His first chapbook, Englishing, will be published this spring by Frog Hollow Press.
Editorial Assistant Jenna Albert conducted this interview by email in mid-March.
----
By Rachel Rose
Three writers: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda, and Betsy Warland. Three different countries: Turkey, Mexico, Canada. Each writer grapples with gender and identity, with loss, with the limits of language, with persistence against the conspiracies of silence, with responding to violence as part of the quotidian, as part of civilian life. On the surface these writers appear to have little in common, and yet their answers, though written separately and thousands of miles apart, seem part of the same conversation.
