Fiddlehead Fiction Editor Mark Anthony Jarman introduces this issue’s contents as a showcase of “great, sensuous stories from the east coast and west coast and around the world,” and adds that the issue also features a nonfiction work, “The Foxes of Prince Edward Island,” by Matthew Ferrence. “. . . it is our desire,” Jarman explains, “to include more creative nonfiction in future issues of The Fiddlehead.” Readers can find Jarman’s introduction and Eden Robinson’s story “Nanas I Have Loved” available to read online.

The Spring 2017 issue of The Fiddlehead: Atlantic Canada’s International Literary Journal includes a special feature on 2016 Griffin Prize international winner Norman Dubie. Editor Ross Leckie introduces the section of twenty-three poems, including five new ones, with “Norman Dubie: The Details of Winter That Upset Us.”

Leckie writes, “No poet I can think of writes as much about dreams as Dubie, and no poet ought to be able to, as dreams are so often adduced as the moment of epiphany, as the encoded truth that underlies all the banality that consumes our daily lives. In Dubie’s work, however, dreams seem as one room in the mind’s library, in which there is also an astonishing array of books and the lives of their authors, and details of plot and character that are not there, but could be. There are landscapes both from memory and from imagination, scenes of history in the grotesquerie of its filth and muck, and assorted friends and family who demand attention, or simply stop by for a chat.”

The Spring 2016 issue of The Fiddlehead features the winners of their 25th annual literary competition:

Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem

Michael Eden Reynolds, “False Dichotomy or Monocot”

Honorable Mentions

Alison Goodwin, “Consumed”

Jeff Parent, “Made By Robots”

Short Fiction First Prize:

Brent van Staalduinen, “Skinks”

Honorable Mentions

Sarah L. Taggart, “The Way It Is In A Place Like This”

Cathy Kozak, “Dirty Girls of Paradise”

These works can be read on The Fiddlehead website along with commentary from Editor Ross Leckie on the winning entries.

I couldn’t help but to share this snippet from Mark Jarman’s editorial remarks for the summer fiction issue of The Fiddlehead (n264):

I will be brief: this is an amazing collection, an astounding summer fiction issue. Look at the stories and writers from around the globe, writers new and proven: no one else in Canada can touch what we are doing right now.

There I’ve said it; the gods of the small mags can strike me down.

Rather than being struck down, I hope this encourages readers to take look (a couple can be read full text online) and judge for themselves!