editorial

One summer, the narrator of “Husbands” arrives at an all-girls camp in Maine, her body gangling and conspicuously mature, yet she still carries a “little layer of baby fat which unfortunately had not melted away in the fires of puberty.” Thus, Emma, like all her thirteenand fourteen-year-old bunkmates, stands on the perilous threshold between childhood and adolescence. In the fog of that time, they begin to play a seemingly innocent game. “The game didn’t start with the bad stuff, that came later,” the older narrator, now married, tells us.

By happenstance, I picked Anne Marie Todkill’s “Storm Damage” as this year’s winner shortly after a citywide July storm cracked the trunk of a much-loved dozy Manitoba Maple out back. However, it matters little whether one has recently encountered and grieved a fallen tree, when it comes to this axiomatic and spellbinding piece. Todkill’s eulogy for a basswood undone by a Gilgameshing derecho’s “unmethodical and ghoulish mangling” will beguile anyone lucky enough to read it.

Creative Nonfiction Contest Editorial

Summer 2022 Editorial

A story. A story. Please tell me a story.

I grew up around storytellers. My paternal grandmother offered up family stories alongside Sunday dinners. I myself performed storytelling in schools as an elementary schoolteacher, prior to becoming a writer. When someone shares a personal account, they are offering up the truth of their experience. What a gift that is to be shared and received. That is why I feel so honoured to be The Fiddlehead’s creative nonfiction editor for this special summer CNF issue that is most dear to my heart.

The delicate interplay between past and present, what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what others take from us is rendered in pitch-perfect prose in “The Makeweight Piece.” This story is set during a distant war in which the starving and the dying cling to art as prayer. As worship. As a way to define who they once were. So much heart is packed between the lines of a story whose tone is at once tightly focused and expansive that my own heart staggers and cracks open. As a reader I’m dying to be touched and amazed.