Happy Holidays!

The Fiddlehead office is closing for the holiday season.

On behalf of the editors and staff, we wish you safe and happy holidays. And we wish you all the best for 2015!

An Interview with Charlie Fiset, contributor to Fiddlehead 261 (Autumn 2014)

No. 261, Autumn 2014

The Autumn 2014 issue of The Fiddlehead, No. 261, features a story by UNB Alumni, and current student, Charlie Fiset. This story, entitled “Maggie’s Farm,” is a fictitious account based on Fiset’s own European travels, imbued with a Greek mythological theme drawn from Homer’s Odyssey. This story was originally part of Fiset’s creative thesis for her MA in Creative Writing.

Charlie Fiset is now in her first year of PhD studies at UNB. Originally from Kirkland Lake in northern Ontario, she has her undergrad degree in Classics and English from Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. “Maggie’s Farm” is her first publication, but she has another story upcoming in The Fiddlehead's summer 2015 fiction issue. That story is about gold-mining and Persephone’s katabasis to the Underworld.

Fiset was kind enough to offer some insight into “Maggie’s Farm” and her creative process, in response to the following questions.

Greg Brown
Editorial Assistant
The Fiddlehead

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Greg Brown: What types of stories or works do you like to read, and which ones inspire you? 

Charlie Fiset: I love epic poems, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor.

GB: What types of stories do you like to write?

CF: Long-short ones!

GB: Does your current dissertation inform your writing at all? And if so, in what way?

CF: My dissertation will be a comparative study of epiphany in the epics of Pound, H.D., and Eliot. I find modern epicists interesting because of the manner in which they consider the history of knowledge; in studying modern epics you’re able to study particular vantages on epistemology since the time of Homer. Pound begins The Cantos in medias res, when Odysseus and his shipmates are leaving Circe’s island. This modernist refiguring of The Odyssey inspired me to refigure my own experiences in an Odyssean frame. I got the idea from Dr. Demetres Tryphonopoulos’ study of The Cantos called The Celestial Tradition.