Spring has Arrived — Well, at least The Fiddlehead Spring Issue has!

Our Spring issue is in the mail and on its way to subscribers and newsstands! Stay tuned next week for the announcement of our contest winners! Until then, we wish you a happy long weekend!

Poetry Co-editor Phillip Crymble Takes Poetry to City Hall

Photo courtesy of City of Fredericton

This past Monday at Fredericton's city council meeting, The Fiddlehead's poetry co-editor Phillip Crymble was introduced as Fredericton's first poet laureate, a position that coincides with national poetry month.

Mayor Woodside welcomed Crymble by saying, "We're really pleased about two things: number one, you're living with us, and selected to call Fredericton home, and second, that you're here tonight to enlighten us."

Part of his role will be to read a commissioned poem to be read at the next council meeting on April 28.

Earlier in the day, Crymble was interviewed by Christine McLean on CBC Fredericton's information morning. Listen to the podcast here.

New Postage Rates Take Effect

Please note, effective March 31, 2014 Canada Post has increased its postal rates. A single stamp has increased from 63¢ to $1.00. An oversize envelope up to 100g now requires $1.80 of postage to return.

Our American friends are also affected. Standard rates have gone up from $1.10 to $1.20.

Submissions with a SASE sent to The Fiddlehead before March 31 will still be returned, but due to these substantial increases in postal rates, submissions sent to us after April 1, 2014 without sufficient postage for return will be responded to by email.

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!