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.

Creative Nonfiction Contest Editorial

This Ain’t No Disco
 

Fiction contest judge, Shashi Bhat's editorial on Elise Thorburn's winning story Rubens' Salmon:

2017’s Summer Fiction Issue showcases great, sensuous stories from the east coast and west coast and around the world, including a wolf guarding a woman trapped in a crashed car, a teen’s fascination with shooting guns, a secret computer file and a zebra rug, flashers in the woods, a very funny exchange of old and young secretly sparring in a London restaurant, and of course, appropriation of Oscar Peterson’s piano bench in Australia.