Fiddlehead Gold: 50 Years of the Fiddlehead Magazine

For half a century, The Fiddlehead has sprung up year after year, green and thriving. On February 28, 1945, it poked its first tender shoot into the literary world, a few mimeographed pages edited by Alfred G. Bailey and featuring poems by members of theUniversity of New Brunswick’s Bliss Carman Poetry Society. When Fred Cogswell became editor, The Fiddlehead became a printed and bound journal. Cogswell’s generous spirit set the future tone of Fiddlehead: the journal that helped start the careers of Margaret (then known as M.E.) Atwood and Al Purdy still showcases works by neophytes alongside those of mature artists. In the 1960s, stories by Alden Nowlan ushered in a new era, and The Fiddlehead took the shape it has today. Fiddlehead Gold harvests choice writings from the whole lifetime of this unique journal: stories by Rohinton Mistry, Joyce Carol Oates, Allan Donaldson, Carol Shields, David Waltner-Toews, Joyce Marshall, Ann Copeland, Miriam Packer, and others; poems by a galaxy of poets including Dorothy Roberts, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, M. Travis Lane, Gwendolyn McEwan, William Bauer, R. Steven Laird, Fred Cogswell, Brian Bartlett, Tom Wayman, Erin Mouré, Karen Connelly, and even Bliss Carman himself. Fiddlehead Gold, like The Fiddlehead itself, contains the best. Mined from Fiddlehead’s 182 issues, Fiddlehead Gold presents a half-century of Canada’s literary life.

Sabine Campbell co-edited Fiddlehead Gold, an anthology marking the 50th anniversary of Canada's oldest literary magazine. As managing editor of The Fiddlehead and a member of its editorial staff since 1985, she knows the work of almost every writer in and from the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Demetres Tryphonoupoulos is the Poetry Editor of Fiddlehead and a professor in the English department of the University of New Brunswick. He teaches modernist poetry and has published extensively on Ezra Pound. Roger Ploude is an editor of the Fiddlehead and co-founder of Studies in Canadian Literature. He teaches Romantic and Victorian poetry and non-fiction prose.