UNB Reading Series Presents: Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage, Canada Reads finalist this year, defended by Samantha Bee, will be reading from his work at University of New Brunswick on Wednesday, April 2, at 8:00 p.m. in the East Gallery of Memorial Hall. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Originally born in Beirut, Hage emigrated first to America in 1984 and then to Canada in 1991. After earning degrees in Photography at Dawson College and Fine Arts at Concordia, Hage worked as a visual artist. In a 2008 author profile of Hage published by Quill & Quire, Hage credits this experience as a visual artist with making him a better writer.

Hage’s first novel, DeNiro’s Game (2006), won the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Hugh MacLellan Prize for Fiction, and the McAuslan First Book Prize.  DeNiro’s Game was also shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award in 2006. His second novel, Cockroach (2008), was similarly successful, and he was once more awarded the Hugh MacLellan Prize for Fiction, as well as being shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, Carnival (2012), was also awarded the Hugh MacLellan Prize for Fiction. In August 2013, Hage was awarded a four-month tenure as writer-in-residence at the Vancouver Public Library.  He lives and works in Montreal.

Competiton to Select Poet Laureate for the City of Fredericton

The City of Fredericton issued the following in a press release on March 4, 2014:

"In celebration of National Poetry Month, the City of Fredericton, in partnership with the Writers' Federation of NB, is looking for a Poet Laureate for the month of April."

This competition is a great opportunity to gain exposure and contribute to the arts in Fredericton. 

The deadline for submissions is March 14, 2014 at 4:30 pm AST.

For more information on the competition, visit the City of Fredericton website.

Fiddlehead Editor Ross Leckie Launches New Book at UNB March 17

The University of New Brunswick would like to invite you to a reading by local poet Ross Leckie. He will be launching his new book of poety, The Critique of Pure Reason (Frog Hollow Press, 2013).

According to Frog Hollow Press, Leckie's most recent collection “makes philosophy into the stuff of language. . . . Leckie writes huge new poems of incredible verbal music.” The collection is Leckie's fourth. His previous collections include A Slow Light, The Authority of Roses, and Gravity's Plumb Line, and his poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Descant, ARIEL, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, Southwest Review, and American Literary Review. He is also editor of The Fiddlehead and a poetry editor for Icehouse Poetry Books, an imprint of Goose Lane Editions.

His reading will be held Monday, March 17 at 8:00 pm in the East Gallery in Memorial Hall on the Fredericton campus.

Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Fiddlehead Author Selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2014!

Michelle Butler Hallett

Michelle Butler Hallett's story "Bush-Hammer Finish," published in The Fiddlehead No. 257 (Autumn 2013), has been selected to be included in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's The Best American Mystery Stories 2014! This will be the 18th edition of the anthology, which last year included Joyce Carol Oates. The book is slated for an October publication and includes the best 20 stories published in North America, selected by guest editor Laura Lippman.

Gerard Beirne, The Fiddlehead's co-fiction editor who selected Butler Hallett's story, had this to say:

"Every story is a mystery story. From the opening sentence we wonder, where do we go from here? Great stories inhabit the mystery, and in particular they inhabit it through the characters whose existence in the story causes us, the readers, to ask the most wondrous and mysterious questions of all — Who am I? and What am I doing here? Great stories somehow reveal a part of these mysteries to us. 

No. 257 (Autumn 2013)

Michelle Butler Hallett’s story caught my attention initially because of the hyperbolic style, the larger than life characters, the black humour; but more importantly, her story held my attention. To pull all of these challenging formal elements together required great authorial control. Indeed, from an editor’s point of view, the first mystery of a successful story can often be, how did the author achieve it?

Well successful it was, and I am delighted that it has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Its inclusion is no mystery to me."

Congratulations Michelle!

Thomas Hodd on New Brunswick's Internationalist Literary Tradition

Charles G.D. Roberts

Thomas Hodd, Université de Moncton professor and poet, has written an interesting piece for The Puritan entitled "'Cross Border Kinship': A Tradition of the Literary Internationalism in New Brunswick." In the article, he argues that The Fiddlehead was controversial in the 1950s when former editor Fred Cogswell opened up the magazine to international submissions. Apparently the Ontario elite (Hodd names Northrup Frye and Earl Birney) decried that Canadian identity itself was under threat. But opening up to cross-cultural influences — and Hodd names several prominent examples of New Brunswick writers, starting all the way back with Sir Charles G. D. Roberts — benefits the work produced (and still being produced) in the province. He says,

It seems to me that New Brunswick’s reputation for producing literary work that exemplifies a stereotyped form of Maritime regionalism is misguided. 

Click here to read the whole article.

Kwame Dawes Pens Olympic Poetry

Former Fiddlehead Editiorial Assistant Kwame Dawes (now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and Editor of Prairie Schooner) kept busy during the recent Winter Olympics by writing poetry inspired by the events for the Wall Street Journal.

Here's an excerpt from his poem "Ode to Canada's Hockey Team," inspired by Canada's 1-0 win over the U.S. in the semi-final game, with a nod to Fredericton:

But do you know what it means to Canadians?
I mean, do you really know what it means?
Like how I nearly got my head bashed
in for saying I did not know what the big
deal was when I lived up there in Freddybeach . . .

Follow this link to read the whole poem, which includes references to Wayne Gretzky, Tim Horton, and the Miramichi!

Odd Sundays at Molly's Presents Richard Kemick and Shari Andrews

This Sunday, February 23 at 2pm come to Molly's Coffee House (554 Queen Street) in downtown Fredericton to listen to Richard Kemick and Shari Andrews read from their poetry. This event is free — there's even a draw for free books! — and all are welcome.

Richard Kemick is currently completing his MA in English and Creative Writing at UNB. He recently won Grain Magazine's 2013 Short Grain Prize for poetry, and his work will be surfacing soon in PRISM International and The Fiddlehead.

Shari Andrews is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Stone Cloak (1999), Bones About to Bloom (2001), Crucible (2004), and Walking the Sky (2005). She lives in New Maryland, NB.