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Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlists

Norman Dubie
(courtesy Griffin Poetry Prize)

Congratulations to all of the finalists for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize! This year's international shortlist includes Norman Dubie's collection The Quotations of Bone. The Fiddlehead has published Dubie's poems on two previous occasions, in issues No. 241 (Autumn 2009) and No. 262 (Winter 2015), and those poems appear in The Quotations of Bone.

Here are the Griffin Prize shortlists in their entirety, as selected by judges Alice Oswald, Tracy K. Smith, and Adam Sol:

International
Norman Dubie, The Quotations of Bone
Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Heaven

Canadian
Ulrikka S. Gernes (translated by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen), Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments
Liz Howard, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
Soraya Peerbye, Tell: poems for girlhood

Readings Galore in Fredericton

Get ready Fredericton for an onslaught of readings!

First of all, Qwerty Reads happens tonight! See their Facebook event page. Qwerty Reads is a evening of poetry, storytelling, and live music celebrating the work of Qwerty Magazine, a literary journal run by UNB English grad students. This month's event, taking place April 14th at 7 PM at the Wilser's Room in the Capital Complex, will feature readings by Alex Carey, Katie Fewster-Yan and Steven Suntres, three of our outgoing MA students, who will be reading from their hot-off-the-press creative writing theses, as well as a poetry reading from UNB alumnus Jennifer Houle. The evening will also feature a performance from Marky Mark & the Jarmen (aka Marky Mark's Jamming Jarmen), a band containing UNB prof Mark Jarman, and a fun Q&A segment with Naomi Lewis, our outgoing writer-in-residence. The event is free and open to the public!

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This Sunday, April 17 at 2pm, the odd sundays reading series features Corrine Wasilewski and Chuck Bowie. Gather once again at Corked Wine Bar, 83 Regent St., Fredericton for a great reading, an open set, and a free book draw!

Corinne Wasilewski was born and raised in Woodstock, NB, but now makes her home in Sarnia, ON where she works as an occupational therapist. Her short stories have appeared in Front & Centre, The Windsor Review, The Nashwaak Review, and The Battered Suitcase. Live from the Underground is her first novel. An early version of the manuscript was awarded the WFNB’s David Adams Richards Prize in 2012.

Chuck Bowie graduated from UNB with a BSc. His writing is influenced by the study of how people behave, habits he developed as his family moved nineteen times in his first twenty one years. Chuck is involved in music, supporting local musicians, occasionally playing with them. He is working through the fourth novel in the series: Donovan: Thief For Hire, titled The Body On The Underwater Road. Chuck and his wife Lois live in Fredericton. They have two adult musician sons.

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And next week, there are two readings to celebrate the shortlists for the New Brunswick Book Awards and the Atlantic Book Awards. The Atlantic Book Awards Festival presents:

On Wednesday, April 20 at 7 PM at the Fredericton Public Library (12 Carleton St.), the CBC’s Jacques Poitras moderates a discussion with shortlisted authors David Sullivan (Boss Gibson: Lumber King of New Brunswick) and Thom Workman (The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada). Books will be for sale by Westminster Books.

And on Thursday, April 21 at 7 PM at Westminster Books (445 King St, Fredericton), please join Ian LeTourneau, Fiddlehead poetry editor and City of Fredericton Cultural Laureate as he hosts an evening featuring readings by Phillip Crymble (Not Even Laughter) M. Travis Lane (Crossover) and Michael Pacey (Electric Affinities), all shortlisted for the New Brunswick Book Awards' Westminster Books Award for Poetry.

Odd Sundays presents Nancy Bauer and Mark Anthony Jarman

This Sunday, April 3, the odd sundays reading series welcomes featured readers Nancy Bauer and Mark Anthony Jarman. odd sundays meets at Corked Wine Bar, 83 Regent Street at 2pm. As always, after the feature readers, there is an open mic and book draw.

Nancy Bauer has published 5 novels, many short stories, and over 80 articles about arts, crafts, and books. She received the Alden Nowlan Excellence Award and a CBC Award for the Short Story. She co-founded the Maritime Writers’ Workshop, published 25 New Brunswick Chapbooks, and helped organize the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. Nancy is a charter member of Gallery Connexion, a member of the NB Arts Board and of several Canada Council juries. She was Writer in Residence at UNB and Bemidji State University. She has taught at UNB in various capacities and at writing workshops all over the Maritimes. For teh past nine years she has written a weekly column on the arts for the Telegraph-Journal.

Mark Anthony Jarman’s latest work is a series of stories titled Knife Party at the Hotel Europa. He is the author of five collections of short stories, a novel and a travel book. Mark has won numerous awards which include the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, and he has been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize. He has published in The Walrus, The Barcelona Review, and The Globe & Mail, and many others. Mark is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches at UNB, where he is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead.

Fiction Editor Mark Jarman Nominated for Two Book Awards!

Fiddlehead fiction editor Mark Anthony Jarman has been shortlisted for two book awards: the inaugural Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, handed out by The Atlantic Book Awards, and the New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction sponsored by Mrs. Dunster's and Fog Lit.

The nominees for the 2016 Atlantic Book Awards were announced last night at a fundraiser at the Halifax Central Library. Included this year in the thirteen prize categories is a new award named for the late Alistair MacLeod. Endorsed by the MacLeod family, the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction honours the best short fiction from Atlantic Canadian authors. Three titles have been named to the shortlist, including Knife Party at the Hotel Europa by Mark Anthony Jarman.

The New Brunswick Book Awards are also in their inaugural year, and have been organized by The Fiddlehead and the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick. This year's prizes recognize the best New Brunswick-authored books of 2015. Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is one of three nominees in the fiction category along with Beth Powning's A Measure of Light and R.W. Gray's Entropic.

A vivid collection of short stories which circle and overlap in unexpected and delightful ways, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa transports readers to a version of sun-drenched Italy — a version of Italy as only one of Canada’s premiere short story writers could imagine it. Widely hailed by both critics and readers, the book has helped cement Jarman’s reputation as one of Canada’s most accomplished masters of prose.

The 2016 Atlantic Book Awards and Festival runs April 20-27 with free literary events in all four provinces. Festival event details will be available at www.atlanticbookawards.ca soon. More details about the New Brunswick Book Awards can be found here. Winners of the 2016 Atlantic Book Awards and the 2015 New Brunswick Book Awards will be announced at a special awards show on the last night of the weeklong festival, Wednesday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton.

UNB Reading Series Presents Sean Michaels on March 23

The Canada Council for the Arts, the UNB Department of English, The Fiddlehead, and the UNB Bookstore are pleased to invite you to a reading by Giller Prize-winning writer Sean Michaels. The event will take place at 8pm on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016, at the Alumni Lounge, in the Alumni Memorial Building, on the UNB Fredericton campus.

Winner of the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors is a beautiful, haunting novel inspired by the true life and loves of the famed Russian scientist, inventor, and spy Lev Termen, the creator of the theremin. Whisking us from the glamour of Jazz Age New York to the gulags and science prisons of the Soviet Union, it is a book of longing and electricity. This sublime debut inhabits the idea of invention on every level, no more so than in its depiction of Termen’s endless feelings for Clara — for what else is love, but the greatest invention of all?

Sean Michaels was born in Scotland, raised in Ottawa, and eventually settled in Montreal, where he founded Said the Gramophone, one of the earliest music blogs. He has since spent time in Edinburgh and Kraków, written for The Guardian and McSweeney’s, toured with rock bands, and received two National Magazine Awards.

Odd Sundays presents Lynn Davies and Sarah Xerar Murphy

The upcoming Odd Sundays reading will feature two New Brunswick poets who represent very different styles of writing.

Lynn Davies (Fredericton) is the author of three books of poetry. The Bridge That Carries the Road was published by Brick Books and shortlisted for the 1999 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the 2000 Gerald Lampert Award. Where Sound Pools (2005) and how the gods pour tea (2013) were both published by Goose Lane Editions. Lynn continues to write poems, essays, stories, and reviews, and works part time at Westminster Books in Fredericton.

Sarah Xerar Murphy (Chamcook) is an interpreter, translator, community activist, award winning author, performance, visual and spoken word artist. She has published, performed, shown and toured in Mexico, Spain, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. She is also the winner of Canada’s Golden Beret Award as well as an Arts Council England International Artist’s Fellowship. One reviewer has said her work contains “. . . all the rush of a subway car on the loose, all the music of a brain scan on acid, all the power of a dive into Niagara” (Bob Holman of Bowery Poets).

Odd Sundays takes place at Corked Wine Bar (83 Regent Street) at 2 pm on March 20.

UNB Reading Series Presents Michelle Butler Hallett

The Canada Council for the Arts, the UNB Department of English, The Fiddlehead, and the UNB Bookstore are pleased to invite you to a reading by Michelle Butler Hallett. The event will take place at 8pm on Wednesday, March 16th, 2016, at the Alumni Lounge, in the Alumni Memorial Building, on the UNB Fredericton campus.

Set in 1593, Michelle Butler Hallett’s This Marlowe reveals two rival spymasters plotting to control succession after Queen Elizabeth’s death. Their schemes depend on Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler’s son from Canterbury, who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright. Now that the plague has closed theatres, Marlowe must resume the work for which he was originally recruited: intelligence and espionage. An historical novel with a contemporary edge, This Marlowe measures the weight of the body politic, the torment of the flesh, and the state of the soul.

Michelle Butler Hallett is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Deluded Your Sailors, Sky Waves, and Double-Blind, and the short-story collection The Shadow Side of Grace. Her stories appear in the anthologies Hard Ol’ Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Running the Whale’s Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She lives in St John’s, Newfoundland.

An Interview with Waste author Andrew F. Sullivan

Andrew F. Sullivan

In the fall of 2013, The Rusty Toque publisher and editor Kathryn Mockler (who had also been my writing professor at The University of Western Ontario) let me do an interview with a Rusty Toque writer of my choosing. My pick was Andrew F. Sullivan, author of 2013’s All We Want Is Everything (ARP), and whose story “Hatchetman” was published in a back issue of The Rusty Toque.

I picked his story because it excited me; “Hatchetman” embodies a kid whose parents are Juggalos. In my mind, Sullivan wrote the story with a delicate balance of pathos and embattled dignity. A story about Juggalos, to me, seemed fresh and interesting.

Sullivan follows All We Want Is Everything with his debut novel Waste (DZANC), another delightfully nightmarish and lively tour of broken people and landscapes. Lauded by writers like Miriam Toews, Craig Davidson, and Michael Christie (and many more), Andrew F. Sullivan is surely a name to remember. The following interview was conducted by email in February 2016.

Alexander Carey

Fiddlehead Editorial Assistant

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Alexander Carey: Miriam Toews supervised early versions of Waste. Were there any particular writers or books that influenced your work on this novel?

Andrew F. Sullivan: What I got from Miriam was the black humour, I think. She has an amazing ability to write about really horrible events and impart a great deal of empathy while also making you laugh. It’s a tough line to walk and it’s a testament to her skill that her books are so heavy and yet really funny at the same time. I think Waste is funny, but that might make me sound like a psycho. That’s definitely where I think my work connects with hers though, despite all the blood on my end.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was also a really big influence on this book. I looked at it as a great first novel, a novel about a community failing a child and just filled with these amazing, empathetic stories behind all the other characters, especially the mother Polly Breedlove. The structure is a lot of fun and you can really see Morrison pulling it all together, and I think it connects with a lot of the themes in Waste, how we isolate and ostracize. So that was a big influence. And Beloved too, which is basically a horror novel with beautiful prose and a story that refuses to die.

Richard Yates and Richard Price are also really big for me. Yates’ The Easter Parade is a fucking harrowing journey with one of my favourite endings and his refusal to spare any of his characters pain while still retaining a lot of empathy for them always stuck with me. You don’t pity them; you see how awful and brutal they can be, but you find yourself feeling sympathy despite it all. Yates could dismantle anyone on the page, but it’s the small pieces he leaves untouched that stick with you. He has no mercy, but a lot of compassion for his characters and I hope that attitude informs Waste to some degree.

Price is one of those guys walking that genre line and I still think Clockers is his best book. He’s done a lot of great things including episodes of The Wire and film scripts for stuff like The Color of Money and he’s got an ear for dialogue, not true to life, which is terrible, but true to how it feels, how it sounds. Record yourself doing an interview and you’ll want to hang yourself with the phone cord with all the uhms and ahhhs and errrrs. Price strips all that out, but gives us the essence of the conversation. His realism is wise and full of the unexpected; it exceeds the term. And I hope he keeps giving us books on the regular. I wanted to draw from that tradition, walking that line, telling a story about crimes gone wrong that could be something more than just solving a mystery of who killed who and why. I want to know how we got there — the meat of it is all in the process, not the end result.

AC: Your 2013 short story collection All We Want Is Everything includes a story called “Simcoe Furriers,” a story that inhabits a similar world to the one you depict in Waste. What is the process like fleshing out a novel from a story, or vice-versa?

AFS: “Simcoe Furriers” (up at Little Fiction now, go read it) was something I wrote after the first draft of the novel was finished, maybe even the second. It’s sort of a deleted scene with some extra characters. A lot of back story ended up chopped from the first draft of Waste, but this was something new, something with different stakes. A world inside a world.

What happens to the body of the lion after Jamie and Moses, the protagonists in Waste, run it over? Whose responsibility is it? Where do the leftovers end up? Waste is a book about neglect and fallout, abandoned responsibilities and attempts at restitution, and the story fits into that world. I was feeling really burned out working a couple different jobs at that time and writing a lot of short fiction because that is what I could fill in between freelance gigs and working 40 hours a week in a store.

I wanted the story to exist on its own, so not all the details are perfect. I did want to create a link between my story collection and this vicious little novel. The fact that the story came out first just makes it stranger. It was also the only story in the collection that was previously unpublished at the time. The city of Larkhill is every bad neighbourhood I ever woke up in and I suppose I still wanted to go back there. It’s a place where all the bathroom floors are carpeted and the tiled walls are weeping mold. It often still feels like home.

AC: Where do the Gothic, fairytales, and realism intersect when you start writing?

AFS: When I start anything, I’m usually starting with a character and a premise that excite me. Realism isn’t going to excite me; it’s not going to unnerve me, it’s rarely going to push me. I pull on things like old myths, urban legends and gothic traditions because that’s where my fuel is. If I’m going to write about three generations of a family in Canada, I hope it’s a story about the bog where they keep their ancestors to consult them on the matters of the day. If I’m writing about grief, maybe the ghost is real. I’m interested in crafting a history in rust — where only half of the truth is readily available. We have to fill in the blanks.

I don’t think “realism” is truly attainable, but I do want a world where there is a system of cause and effect that I can understand, even if it only gives me chaos in the end. Realism can become a crutch for boring writing — not bad writing, necessarily, but boring. Nothing I would care about, nothing I would want to digest on a regular basis. But it provides you with an anchor in the real world, if only to make the distance, the divergence that much sharper. Realism works when it teeters on the edge — when it says “maybe.”

Realism for me collides with how we protect ourselves with stories, how we use myths to build up our fears, our enemies, our horrors — and then bring them down. Realism works in tandem with fairytales and the gothic because it offers us a chance that this could happen; it’s not fantasy. I want to avoid saying magical realism unless I’m in that specific tradition because I think otherwise, outside its context, magical realism is often used to explain away the uncanny or the strange in fiction—it’s a safe place to dump your fears.

AC: Where does a depiction of fictional Larkhill, Ontario and your own experiences in Oshawa, Ontario start and end? What is your process for fictionalizing a city and what do you think are the advantages of that decision?

AFS: Larkhill is a lot like Lumberton, North Carolina in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, I think. It’s a place that is festering beneath the surface and beginning to rot along the edges. Its veneer of civility is slipping. It’s a myth and a legend, but the wrong kind, the kind that gets you hurt.

Oshawa these days does not really resemble Larkhill, but in the middle of winter in the late 80s and early 90s, it did feel that way. We don’t get a lot of Canadian fiction about these larger urban outposts, cities over 100,000 or so, cities just big enough to get lost in, cities just big enough to have problems they can’t really get a handle on anymore. Drug abuse, homelessness, destitution—the fallout of industrial cities. We get a lot of those stories coming out of the Rust Belt in the States, but Ontario has had some of its own fallout here too. Unfortunately, a lot of our narratives vacillate between the small town and the metropolis without a lot of space in between. We spend a lot of time reminiscing, reflecting, remembering, reorganizing our pasts. You’ll get a lot of statements about fiction exploring themes of memory and loss — well, no shit. It’s like saying a book has words.

I wanted to create a new city like Larkhill to give myself the space to explore how a community can fail itself. I wanted to pull in pieces of places I’ve been in Ontario that fit parts of the mold — Peterborough, Windsor, London, Sarnia, Hamilton, Kitchener, etc. Oshawa is just another of these cities. Places where you won’t get a lot of murders, but places where you will find a lot of stolen car radios. Places where you can see the edge, the spot where someone slips and no one moves to help them. All these places have those streets.

Larkhill in Waste is a vicious nasty place where I dumped 10+ years of police blotter info over a three-day period. It’s the ugly side of your city after dark; it’s got one foot forever stuck in the gutter. It’s not patient. It’s not waiting for you to come home from the bar. Larkhill is a surreal place, but I think that brings it closer to something true, something beyond a sober recounting of where one street intersects with another. Larkhill carries parts of me in it, the liquor warehouse, the waste buckets, the abandoned factories, the dead lawns, the edge of urban sprawl, and those are parts of the old Oshawa too. But in the end it is my world, my bizarre little canvas where I’m trying to work through what makes a place toxic, what can make a community fail itself. Fragile communities and fragile families is what Waste is really about in the end, I guess. Stand back and watch them fall.

AC: When I read Waste, the word ‘cinematic’ came to mind; I thought the novel tread territory similar to a movie like American History X and a few of the acclaimed crime shows on HBO. What, in your mind, does a ‘cinematic’ label mean to a story?

AFS: Cinematic is definitely the right term, I suppose. I am heavily influenced by film, from Cronenberg to Lubitsch, Żuławski to Scorsese. It’s probably an even split between film and prose for me, to be honest. Cinematic when it comes to Waste, I think is a comment on how the book is structured, the editing and my own stylistic ticks. I think in terms of zooms, cuts and dialogue. I spread detail through conversations and deliver back story within action.

I try to tell stories through the actions of my characters. Action and consequence drive my work, rather than reflection and contemplation, and I think that’s where it connects with a lot of modern cinema. Violence is traded back and forth in a lot of my work, but in fairly petty, brief instants that require a lot of punch to deliver. Violence is everyday and endemic, but you still need to feel it. There is definitely a bit of Coen brothers in there. A little bit of Fargo even if I didn’t realize it until today. People do awful things, and yet it’s a beautiful day. With my novel, it’s a machine that is always moving, until it’s not.

When I am making line edits, it is like I am deciding where I want my camera to go, where the focus will be, how I will shift into the foreground or cut to a new character. The beautiful thing about fiction is I can do it all on my own. Film is an amazing form, but it requires capital. It requires collaboration. It requires more than one man can offer, and so it’s a lot harder to achieve that on your own. And I don’t think film offers the same access to the inner life of the characters, the psychological realism — I think prose still offers the best experience in that respect. But to me, these are stories told with whip pans and fade-outs and overlapping dialogue. Or maybe Robert Altman meets David Cronenberg in a back alley somewhere and out crawls a creature like Waste, wet and dripping and asking you to take it home.

AC: What’s next for you?

AFS: I want to get weirder, or to embrace my tendency for the uncomfortable and unsettling a bit more. More explicit, more visceral, more and more of whatever I can throw out there, while keeping a tight hold on the edits. I still want to have some anchor in the real world, but I want to see how far out I can drift out into the slipstream. I’ve got a collection of stories about nightmare hotlines, car accidents, grief vampires and blind children bouncing around right now and a couple novels about human trafficking and a father who can’t die on the backburner. Always something new. If I offer any more details than that and I will probably lose all momentum on the projects, but that’s the way it goes. The other day I saw a strange ugly painting of an opossum and it sent me down a weird path. I almost started sketching out a whole new novel right there just based on that painting. So hopefully that keeps happening.

I know I’m never really done. And that’s okay.

Upcoming readings: Qwerty Reads, Odd Sundays, and Three Book Launches

Qwerty Reads takes place tonight, February 18 at Wilser's Room (366 Queen St.) featuring readings by 1st-year MA in Creative Writing students, a reading by Naomi K. Lewis, UNB's writer-in-residence this semester, and live music by UNB students. The festivities start at 7pm.

Qwerty Reads is a monthly reading series hosted by Qwerty Magazine and aims to promote the magazine and the local arts scene in general. Each event features a different headline reader - sometimes it's a writer coming through town promoting a new book, sometimes it's a member of the UNB community.

"odd sundays" continues on Feb. 21. The featured readers will be local writers Gerry Beirne and Shari Andrews.

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer. His collection of short stories, In A Time Of Drought And Hunger, has just been released by Oberon Press. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award. His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London) was short-listed for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004.

Shari Andrews’ recently launched her sixth collection of poetry First Thin Light. In this her fifth book from Oberon Press, Shari "considers the bonds that tie the present to the past in terms of what it means to be female, and the influences both obvious and subtle that have gathered to define her."

As always the opening part of the afternoon with our featured readers will be followed by a short break. Then comes the open mic session and our now-becoming-famous book draw to close out the afternoon.

The event takes place at Corked Wine Bar, 83 Regent St., which opens at 1:30. The festivities begin at 2:00.

The UNB Department of English, The Fiddlehead, and the UNB Bookstore are pleased to invite you to the book launches of Phillip Crymble, Gerard Beirne, and R.W. Gray. The event will take place at 8 pm on Wednesday, February 24th, 2016, at the Alumni Lounge, in the Alumni Memorial Building, on the UNB Fredericton campus.

Phillip Crymble's first full-length collection, Not Even Laughter, explores the work and sensibilities of those whose ideas and visions have been long overlooked. The technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity unite the eclectic subject matter in this literary debut.

Born in Belfast, N. Ireland, Crymble holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing a PhD in American Literature at the University of New Brunswick.

Set in a Cree community in northern Manitoba, Gerard Beirne’s short story collection In a Time of Drought and Hunger draws on Beirne’s family experiences as Irish immigrants. This book has been a long time in the making, and the disaffected people who fill its pages have moved everyone who has read it.

Beirne completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University and now lives in Fredericton, NB. He is the author of three novels and two collections of poems.

In his second collection of stories, Entropic, Canadian author and filmmaker R.W. Gray once again finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet--sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.

Gray was born and raised on the northwest coast of BC, and received a PhD in literature from the University of Alberta. He is an active writer who has had ten short screenplays produced. He is a senior editor of the web magazine Numéro Cinq, and he teaches at the University of New Brunswick.

Fiddlehead Editors and Contributors in the News

Congratulations to a pile of Fiddlehead editors and contributors on their recent successes.

Poetry Editor Ian LeTourneau was recently named the City of Fredericton's Cultural Laureate. According to the city's press release, "The position may have a focus on different arts disciplines periodically but it was determined that the inaugural laureate will be a poet laureate in recognition of Fredericton’s literary heritage and it’s designation as the Poet’s Corner of Canada. Mr. LeTourneau will compose and present poems for 4-6 official City of Fredericton events per year. He will collaborate with the Fredericton Public Library on programs to engage children and adults. The laureate is also expected to support and raise the profile of Fredericton’s vibrant artistic community and heritage and reach out to a broad audience through public appearances and outreach activities."

Poetry Editor Rebecca Salazar recently published an essay at The Partisan that examines the juncture of the personal and the political. You can read it here.

Fiction editor Gerard Beirne has a story published at Numèro Cinq that also appears in his brand new book of stories, In a Time of Drought and Hunger (Oberon, 2015). You can read "What a River Remembers of its Course" here.

And finally, Danny Jacobs, former editorial assistant and past contributor, has just won Prism International's Non-fiction prize for his piece "Ghostly Transmissions from John D. Rockefeller." It will be published in their Spring issue.

Congrats to all!

UNB Reading Series Presents Rita Wong on February 11

The Canada Council for the Arts, The University of New Brunswick, The Fiddlehead, and the UNB Bookstore are pleased to invite you to a literary reading by celebrated poet Rita Wong on Thursday, February 11, 2016 at 8 pm in the East Gallery of Memorial Hall on the Fredericton Campus. 

Rita Wong’s work examines the relationships among social justice, ecology, decolonization, and contemporary poetics. She is the author of four books of poetry: monkeypuzzle (1998); forage (2007): sybil unrest (2008, with Larissa Lai); and most recently, undercurrent (2015). forage won the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Canada Reads Poetry 2011. Wong is an associate professor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

The reading is free and all are welcome to attend.

Odd Sundays Presents Naomi K. Lewis and Aaron Giovannone on February 7

February 7th's "odd sundays" features Naomi K. Lewis and Aaron Giovannone. This is a free event that takes place at Corked Wine Bar, 83 Regent St. at 2pm. Come for the reading, the open mic, and the book draw!

Naomi K. Lewis is the current UNB Writer-in-Residence and is here during the 2016 winter term. She is a writer, editor, and teacher, based in Calgary. Her  2008 novel Cricket in a Fist was written during her time at UNB as a Creative Writing graduate student. Her 2012 story collection I Know Who You Remind Me Of won Enfield & Wizenty's Colophon Prize and was shortlisted for two Alberta book awards. Her non-fiction has been shortlisted for provincial and national magazine awards. For the past decade she has also worked as a magazine editor.

Aaron Giovannone’s first full-length collection of poetry is The Loneliness Machine (Insomniac Books, 2013). His poems have also appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, Event, Filling Station, Prairie Fire, and Prism International. Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario, Aaron is a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Calgary. With a grant from the International Council for Canadian Studies, he spent a year at the Università di Sienaon. He also lived in Castelliri, Italy. Aaron has a Ph.D. in English literature and teaches at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia.

An Interview with Singer-Songwriter Mo Kenney

Mo Kenney is a singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Her latest album, In My Dreams, produced by fellow Halifax native Joel Plaskett, was just nominated for Adult Alternative Album of the Year at the 2016 Junos. The Fiddlehead's editorial assistant Ryan Gaio spoke with the singer-songwriter in January, just before her two appearances at Fredericton's Shivering Songs festival. In this interview she talks to Ryan about her writing process, collaboration, dealing with negative feedback and more. Warning: there is some use of profanity.

For more information on her music and tour dates, visit her website.

UNB Reading Series Presents K.D. Miller and Naomi K. Lewis

The Canada Council for the Arts, ArtsNB, The University of New Brunswick, The Fiddlehead, and the UNB Bookstore are pleased to invite you to a literary reading by acclaimed writers K.D. Miller and Naomi K. Lewis on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 8 pm in the Alumni Lounge on the Fredericton Campus.

K.D. Miller is a poet, essayist, novelist, and short story writer living in Toronto. Her most recent work, and fourth collection of short stories, All Saints, was short-listed for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was included in The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books list for 2014. She has been a guest on CBC’s Tapestry and The Next Chapter.

A Canadian writer of fiction and non-fiction, Naomi K. Lewis has published multiple books, short stories, and articles. Her story collection I Know Who You Remind Me Of won Enfield & Wizenty's 2012 Colophon Prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the Alberta Readers' Choice Award and the Georges Bugnet Award for fiction. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick.

The event is free and open to the public.

Odd Sundays Reading Series On January 31, and Upcoming UNB Reading Series Events

"odd sundays" resumes on January 31st when we welcome Fredericton Gender Minority Group members Reid Lodge, AJ Ripley, and Rhys Humphries as our featured readers.

Reid Lodge is an LGBTQ rights advocate who focuses on improving transgender New Brunswickers’ human rights.

AJ Ripley dabbles in fiction, interviews, and personal essays. They are currently working on a PhD in feminist media studies, digital culture, and queer theory (UNB).

The majority of Rhys Humphries’ personal writing is best described as “creamy scrambled eggs peppered with a bit of reality, or maybe a lot of emotion and no real sense.”

As always, "odd sundays" invite you to gather at Corked Wine Bar, 83 Regent St. at 2 P.M., Jan. 31. Come and enjoy what our guests have to offer, enjoy the readings during the open mic session, and stay for your chance to win in the book draw.

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UNB Reading Series — Winter 2016

February 3	K.D. Miller	Alumni Memorial	8pm
	Naomi K. Lewis
February 11	Rita Wong	East Gallery, Mem. Hall	8pm
March 16	Michelle Butler Hallett	Alumni Memorial	8pm
March 23	Sean Michaels	Alumni Memorial	8pm

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Mark Jarman Reads in Halifax, January 22nd

The Fiddlehead's Fiction co-editor, Mark Anthony Jarman is reading tonight in Halifax at St. Mary's University.

Mark's most recent book, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, is a story collection published by Goose Lane Editions in 2015. His other books include 19 Knives, My White Planet, New Orleans is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland's Eye.  His novel, Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca's list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon's list of best hockey fiction.

Mark has been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and Best American Essays, he won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, won the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, and has been included in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories.

If you are in Halifax, this evening -- do head down to St. Mary's University to the Atrium, Room 101, 5940 Inglis St for the reading at 7:00 pm and to say hi to Mark. The reading is free and open to the public.

Odd Sundays Returns on January 17 with Spoken Word Collective

Returning to Corked Wine Bar (83 Regent St.) on January 17 is the "odd sundays" reading series!

The featured guests will be the spoken word collective, "The Uprisers" from St. Thomas University. Members include Blair Webber, Tyler Lifford, Brianna Parker, Victoria Vee, Anthony Bryan, and their professor, Andrew Titus.  The collective draws its inspiration from the likes of Shane Koyzscan and Sarah Kay, and is dedicated to spreading the poetic word to willing and unwilling ears alike! Audience members should come ready to be dealt a powerful, sometimes quiet/sometimes boisterous, raucous and reflective deck of poetry, served hot.

Festivities get under way at 2pm. Open mic session and book draw as per usual afterwards.

Books Received — What are you Looking Forward to Read?

Below is a picture of the recent books received at the office. What are you most looking forward to reading? Tell us! Go to the comment field below (or to Facebook or Twitter) and tell us what you're most looking forward to reading!