"Evanescent indeed": The Review Review Reads Fiddlehead's West Coast Issue

Lori A. May at The Review Review reads The Fiddlehead's West Coast issue, and she likes what she reads! She says, "The country may have beautifully distinguishable regions, yet the voices within them branch inward, outward, and transcend borders in original ways. Thus, this issue of The Fiddlehead is perfectly representative of the diversity of styles, voices, and approaches to writing in and about Canada."

You can read the full review on The Review Review's website.

The Malahat Review's East Coast issue Reviewed

Over at The Review Review, Jenelle Hayward enthusiastically reviews The Malahat's Essential East Coast issue.

She says,

I have always been a fan of Canadian writers but this issue of The Malahat Review reminded me just how much I enjoy them. The writing was stunning and surprising with every turn of the page.

We here at The Fiddlehead wholeheartedly agree!

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And more great news to start the new year! The Malahat no. 180 gets reviewed over at New Pages! Here's part of what reviewer John Palen has to say:

For me, the collaboration between the two magazines helps to clarify the distinction between a literature limited by its regionalism and one brought alive by its sense of place. This issue of Malahat is definitely alive.

The Malahat & The Fiddlehead Featured on CBC Radio

CBC British Columbia recently featured The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review on their weekday afternoon radio program All Points West.

State of the Arts columnist Jennifer Chrumka examined both the West Coast and East Coast issues, and she talks about the collaboration.

Listen to the podcast here.

On the podcast, you'll also hear Ross Leckie, editor of The Fiddlehead, speak about Atlantic literature, and The Malahat's editor John Barton and University of Victoria professor Nicholas Bradley discuss West coast literature.

A Successful East Coast/West Coast Halifax Launch!

Back row, left to right: Chris Donahoe, Warren Heiti, Matt Cornfield,
Peter Sanger, E. Alex Pierce, Carole Glasser Langille.
Front row, left to right: Heather Jessup, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Brian Bartlett.

On Thursday, October 29, 2012, the University of King's College in Halifax hosted a launch for Halifax-area contributors to The Malahat Review's East Coast issue. Authors read their work from The Malahat and selected a piece from The Fiddlehead's West Coast issue to share with the audience. Our Halifax correspondant Brian Bartlett sent us a photograph and reports that it was a "fine, lively occasion."

Dobozy Writes a Doozy

Siege 13, Tamas Dobozy (Thomas Allen)

Siege 13 is a stupendous book, a surprising book, thirteen artful and exciting stories united by the events and fallout of the bloody siege of Budapest in 1944, where Hungarians were caught between the Nazis who occupied Budapest and the Soviet behemoth Red Army which soon conquered the city (what a cheery choice: Adolf or Uncle Joe). This battle is not as well-known as Stalingrad or Berlin: the specific settings and accompanying icons — machine guns, tracers, rockets, and bodies heaped in cellars — are both familiar and unfamiliar, a puzzling, devastating cauldron of a conflict that leaves Siege 13’s characters and families haunted and driven by violence, memory, disillusionment, traps, and dreams of escape. The war ends, the Iron Curtain goes up, and the horrors and arguments resonate for decades in kitchens and lecture halls and émigré cafes.

The book’s tone resonates with Eastern European influences, perhaps more akin to Kafka or Bruno Schulz than W.O. Mitchell. The moving betrayals and disappointments remind me of the classic Stalin-era novel, Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (Koestler was born in Budapest), yet some of the cranky characters and muttering uncles in social clubs would not be out of place in the shadowed hallways of Ben Katchor’s NYC graphic novels, grainy milieus that are both aged and contemporary.

From the Inside

Yasuko Thanh. Photo by Will Johnson

Floating Like the Dead, Yasuko Thanh. McClelland and Stewart, 2012.
People who love to read know what’s in it for them: entry into a word-filled universe that is blissfully empty of self. But what’s in it for the author? The manipulation of words and imagery? Of course, that’s a pleasure an author can also share with the reader. But sometimes I wonder if the primary motivation to write fiction isn’t sheer curiosity. Sometimes the curiosity is of a prurient nature, or invasive, or not far off gossip; it would be tasteless if the people were real. Maybe what fiction does for us, author and reader alike, is to solve the philosophical problem of other minds. We know other people must be out there, when their depiction can be so varied and so convincing.

Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh is a collection of short stories that exhibits this kind of virtuosic inquisitiveness. What is it like to be a criminal on death row waiting for his execution, what is it like to be in flight from bank robbery, to attempt escape from a leper colony, to keep a suicide pact, to be a nursemaid with a Vietnamese boyfriend in rural post-War Germany, to die of AIDS?

The Fiddlehead's Interview with Joan Clark

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with acclaimed Canadian author and current University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence Joan Clark. Our discussion moved from her early career in Alberta up to her novel-in-progress (which is set in Sussex, NB) and the state of Canadian publishing.

Joan Clark is a Member of the Order of Canada and the author of two short story collections, four novels, six novels for younger readers, and three picture books. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

- Kyle Connelly, Editorial Assistant

Listen to the interview in your web browser.

(Right Click or Control Click on the above link to download mp3 interview.)

The Poetics of Everyday Life

The Collected Poems, Patrick Lane. Harbour, 2011.

Patrick Lane is, of course, one of the most well known names in Canadian poetry, and his Collected Poems affords the opportunity to assess not just his achievement, but his role in the history of our literature. It seems oddly premature to review the career of a poet who is still very much alive and writing poetry, yet he was part of a dominant mode that was particularly Canadian, that emerged in the fifties, and became extremely popular in the sixties and seventies. It was a poetry that was plain spoken, emotionally vulnerable, anecdotal, both sincere and robust in its accounting of human suffering and personal pain, yet able at its best to contain excess in the poise of the ironic turn. This mode of poetry, as it became popular, was practiced in every corner of Canada by a plethora of poets, many of them very good, but the figures of this tradition who will be identified as major poets must include Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, Robert Gibbs, Al Purdy, Gary Geddes, Lorna Crozier, and Patrick Lane.
A reader of Lane’s Collected Poems will immediately notice that I am focusing on a signature achievement that features the first half of his oeuvre, and, as new types of poetics developed in the eighties, nineties, and the twenty-first century, so also has Lane’s poetry evolved. He is a remarkably flexible poet. Perhaps it is appropriate that I speak of this earlier Patrick Lane, so familiar to us, in this west coast issue of The Fiddlehead, because the story of this quotidian and conversational form of poetry began in the pages of The Fiddlehead near the beginning of its history in 1945.

A Poetics of Decolonization

An Interview with Tim Lilburn
By Shane Rhodes

The following is a conversation between Shane Rhodes and Tim Lilburn about Lilburn’s recently published, Assiniboia, and Rhodes’ work in progress, X. The conversation took place over a few weeks this summer and was conducted by email.

Shane Rhodes: Assiniboia is built on an argument that the colonization of the land on which we live in Canada is not only a process of the past but an ongoing process that invades and engenders the present of our settler society, our relationship to land, our relationship to First Nations, our relationships to each other, and even our poetics. What you seem to be proposing in Assiniboia (and propose is almost too weak of a word for your insistence) is a different way of thinking about the past, the present, and colonization. What is some of the thinking that made you want to attempt Assiniboia? Why now?

Tim Lilburn: The Harper government is proposing a model of this country that places Western Canada’s resource wealth, especially tar sands oil, at its centre. I, along with many others, am uncomfortable with an understanding of the West that is built entirely on an extractive, and environmentally irresponsible and dangerous, approach to wealth — the snatch it and leave strategy, decamping to England or a gated community on Vancouver Island — the old Hudson Bay Company, Rupert’s Land model, the new big oil model. I would like an alternative way of imagining where I live.

The Fiddlehead's West Coast Issue has Arrived!

Malahat editor John Barton holds a copy
of The Fiddlehead's west coast issue
at our office in Fredericton

And we launch it tonight along with The Malahat Review's East Coast issue!

This special event takes place at 8pm in the Bailey Auditorium, Tilley Hall, UNB Fredericton. Refreshments will be served; doors open at 7:30.

Copies of both issues will be available for sale (cash or cheque). This event is free and everyone is welcome.

West Coast and East Coast Issues to Launch October 25!

On October 25, join The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review, two of Canada’s most respected literary journals, as they present their West Coast and East Coast editions.

The Fiddlehead surveys West Coast writing and The Malahat Review shines a lighthouse beam on East Coast writing. A number of authors will be present to read from these two journals, and the event will be hosted by Ross Leckie, editor of The Fiddlehead, and by John Barton, editor of The Malahat.

The event takes place at 8pm in the Bailey Auditorium, Tilley Hall, UNB. Refreshments will be provided. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Thanks to our sponsor

Ragged and True

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan. Thomas Allen, 2011
Winner of the Giller Prize

The remarkable story in this book is told in a voice most of us have never heard before. It is the voice of an old, black jazz musician from Baltimore recalling in his own unique dialect the precarious life he lived with other black musicians, first fleeing the Nazis from pre-War Germany to wartime France, and finally escaping to America.

     A weird feeling rose up in me. Last I seen Unter den Linden, they torn out all them linden trees that gave the boulevard its name, tossed up white columns in their place, sanded the pavement so their damn jackboots wouldn’t slip.
     "This ain’t our Berlin, Sid," said Chip.
     I nodded. "It’s lost something I bet ain’t nobody even remember what it was."
     "Except us, brother. Except you and me."

I took a very short survey of my friends who read this book. One of them, a Canadian, thought it was the best book he had ever read, and this was because of the reality of that voice. Another reader, an American, found the voice annoying, and felt the book was patronizing, or worse, even an insult. However you feel about this book is how you respond to the voice of the narrator.

The West Coast Issue

The Fiddlehead's
West Coast Issue

It is about one thousand miles from Ireland to Slovenia. It is a little less than three thousand from Fredericton to Victoria. I know a number of people in Atlantic Canada who have never been to British Columbia. If you have not been, the mountains and narrow valleys of BC are as strange and fantastical as the Slovenian Alps. From the perspective of Atlantic Canada, BC is unimaginably vast and variable. Atlantic Canada is surprisingly bigger than it seems when looking at its small cluster of provinces on a map, and the difference between the four provinces is remarkable. Beyond tourism photos how do we explain ourselves to each other?

Well, to some extent, we don’t, but there are many ways we can. We have the marvelous Canada Council for the Arts that maintains a mandate to get artists and writers back and forth across the country, and in 2010-11 we were lucky to have John Barton in Fredericton as writer-in-residence. One night over beer at The Lunar Rogue we realized that The Fiddlehead still tends to get submissions from the Atlantic region and The Malahat from British Columbia. We started to concoct a scheme we knew we’d forget in the morning for some kind of cumbersome joint issue crossing work from our two regions.


The Lunar Rogue pub in downtown Fredericton

The problem niggled at us, though. John was discovering writers out here he hadn’t read or even heard of, and I became increasingly aware of how little I knew of the far west. The collaborative Fiddlehead/Malahat issues became a firm commitment. Of course, it isn’t obvious what makes a writer an east coast or west coast writer, or even if we should care. One thing that became evident, however, is that many writers care. Whether “born and raised” or “transplanted,” writers in Canada think deeply about how we imagine home, environment, place, and space. They are not afraid to be identified with a region, or a city, a town, an island, a rural habitat, or a “middle of nowhere.”

Our west coast issue is, of course, an idiosyncratic assemblage. The writers included are a small and in some ways quirky sample of the extensive array of BC writers, and we didn’t spend much time worrying if the works we selected reflected some aspect of BC landscape or culture, though most do. As editors we understood that British Columbia is an “imagined community,” held together as a political construct. There is, however, some unidentifiable evanescent thread that runs through this our west coast issue, and, after reading it, you will know so much more about BC than you did before.

Ross Leckie
Editor