UNB Reading Series presents Madeleine Thien + Fiddlehead News

The University of New Brunswick would like to invite you to a special reading by Madeleine Thien. The reading will take place on Tuesday, February 5 at 8pm in the Alumni Memorial Lounge, University of New Brunswick.

Madeleine Thien will read from her new novel, Dogs at the Perimeter. Thien is the author of two previous works of fiction, Simple Recipes (2001), a collection of short stories, and Certainty (2006), a novel. She has received the City of Vancouver Book Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Ovid Festival Prize, and her fiction and essays have been featured in Granta, The Walrus, and Brick. Thien lives in Montreal.

Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Johanna Skibsrud, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, says this about Dogs at the Perimeter: "If you read one Canadian book this year, let it be this one."

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Contributor to The Fiddlehead no. 254 Tamas Dobozy was recently interviewed by Shelagh Rogers on her CBC program The Next Chapter. You can listen to the podcast here.

Winter Issue Newly Arrived from the Printer

No. 254 - Winter 2013

The Fiddlehead's winter issue has recently arrived at our office, and we're preparing to mail it out to our subscribers.

You don't want to miss this one!

Featuring an eye-catching painting by Grand Bay, NB artist Cliff Turner, and the usual fine selection of stories and poems from established and emerging writers, issue no. 254 is sure to help get you through the winter months entertained and enriched. 

Elizabeth Brewster, 1922-2012

Elizabeth Brewster (photo by Richard Marjan)

The news of the death of Elizabeth Brewster has saddened us at The Fiddlehead, and me in particular as editor.  During World War II Alfred Bailey organized a group known as the Bliss Carman Society to meet at his home to critique each other’s poetry, and Betty Brewster, as she was known, was a part of this group.  It was the idea of Don Gammon to form The Fiddlehead to publish the members of the group, and so Elizabeth Brewster joined in to found The Fiddlehead, which first appeared in 1945.  As far as I know, she was the last living member of the Bliss Carman Society.

A new poetic was given birth at these meetings of the Bliss Carman Society, one that would lead to a complete break with Canadian modernism.  Brewster was a leading figure in the formation of a poetry that is plainspoken, precise in its observations of everyday life, and rooted very much in place, as can be seen in her early New Brunswick poem, “Where I Come From.”

Brewster’s poems appeared in the very first Fiddlehead, and in memoriam we will be publishing some of her early work from those first issues in this coming spring number of The Fiddlehead.

Ross Leckie, Editor