Content note: references residential school abuse
On my desk at home, I have a small framed photograph, an inch square, one of those black and white school pictures. In it, I’m about five, a bit of a smile, neat brown hair clipped back in a barrette. It was taken at about the time my mother first told me that I was half Indian.
Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Margaret Watson whose story "The Returning Wife" appeared in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)
Miriam Richer: “The Returning Wife” is such a psychologically complex story. I can’t imagine the narrative without a character like Rosemary at its centre, and yet the plot is—at least according to your taxi driver—all too common. Which came to you first: the protagonist, or the scenario?
Kaleidoscope: Shifting borders of dream, reality, fictions and memories
A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje. McClelland and Stewart, 2024.
Words in search of a body: Matthew Walsh’s sophomore turn in Terrarium.
Terrarium, Matthew Walsh. Goose Lane Editions, 2024.
We're excited to announce that the winner of our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize is Nancy Huggett! Her essay "I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all" is featured in the upcoming autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.301).
thom vernon invites readers to meet sex and death
I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley, thom vernon. Guernica Editions, 2024.
Wildly audacious. Hilarious yet devastating. Punchy and raw. I’ve never read a novel like thom vernon’s I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley. As a novelist, vernon breaks all the rules because he knows them. It’s why the story leaps off the page. This novel begs to be a film, and I shouldn’t be surprised considering vernon’s backstory of being an actor-turned-writer.
I am a good mother.
Reckoning and Reclaiming
Your Body Was Made For This, Debbie Bateman, Ronsdale Press, 2023.
Vancouver Island writer Debbie Bateman’s first collection of short stories, Your Body Was Made for This, follows in the tradition of Margaret Laurence’s unforgettable Hagar Shipley and Sharon Butala’s older women protagonists. Midlife presents an opportunity for the characters to reckon with and reclaim their lives, and Bateman’s collection of linked short stories explores older women’s experiences of their own bodies and their relationships.
A poet glimpses his soul and mortality: ‘Please return my life of tender purpose to its memory’
In The Capital City of Autumn, Tim Bowling. Wolsak and Wynn, 2024.
