About The Fiddlehead

The Fiddlehead

The Fiddlehead is a Canadian literary magazine published quarterly at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Founded in 1945, it is the oldest continuously published Canadian literary magazine still in circulation, and it bills itself as "Canada's longest living literary journal." It publishes poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and personal essays, and its website is thefiddlehead.ca.

Overview

The magazine appears four times a year and carries the ISSN 0015-0630. Its current editor is Sue Sinclair, with contributing editors including Ross Leckie, Bill Gaston, Gerard Beirne, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky. The journal publishes poems, short stories, reviews, and occasionally personal essays, balancing emerging writers with established names.

History

The Fiddlehead was established in 1945 by Alfred Bailey as an in-house publication for the Bliss Carman Poetry Society, which Bailey had founded in 1940 after becoming head of UNB's History Department in 1938. A published poet, Bailey sought to revive Fredericton's literary community, gathering fellow poets and writers at his home; the society — which Bailey described as "not really a society but my guests" — traced its poetic lineage to Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Francis Joseph Sherman.

The first issue appeared in February 1945: a few mimeographed pages edited by Bailey, featuring poems by society members. As Bailey explained in that issue, the magazine took its name from "a small plant that grows in the Saint John river valley in the spring, and which is said to be symbolic of the sun" — the fiddlehead fern, New Brunswick's beloved spring delicacy. The poems, he wrote, were "not 'published,' but are brought together in this form as a record largely for private circulation among members of the Society and their friends." Early issues averaged about ten poems each on large mimeographed pages; a painting of a fiddlehead by Lucy Jarvis, UNB's one-time art director, adorned every cover from inception until 1967.

The journal was adapted as a general literary magazine in 1952, opening its pages to outside contributors. When Fred Cogswell became editor, The Fiddlehead became a printed and bound journal, and Cogswell's generous spirit set its future tone: the journal that helped start the careers of Margaret Atwood and Al Purdy showcased new writers alongside mature artists. In the 1960s, stories by Alden Nowlan ushered in a new era. Early prominent contributors included Elizabeth Brewster, Fred Cogswell, Desmond Pacey, Dorothy Livesay, and Al Purdy; by the early 1960s a new generation — including Atwood and Michael Ondaatje — was publishing there. Leonard Cohen later recalled the wonderful work he was reading in the Fiddlehead in his early days as a hopeful poet in Montreal.

The magazine celebrated its 70th anniversary with the Winter 2015 issue. Fiddlehead Gold: Fifty Years of The Fiddlehead Magazine (1995) anthologized choice writings from its first half-century: stories by Rohinton Mistry, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Shields, and others, and poems by Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Erin Mouré, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, among many.

Content

Each quarterly issue publishes poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and occasional personal essays. The journal's pages have hosted a galaxy of Canadian writing across eight decades, and its commitment to new voices alongside established ones has made it a career-launching venue for generations of writers.

Coverage & Audience

The Fiddlehead's readership is Canada's literary community: poets, fiction writers, creative-writing students and teachers, scholars of Canadian literature, and subscribers to literary journals. Published in Fredericton and distributed nationally, its influence is measured in the careers it launched and the anthologies — from Fiddlehead Gold to the Journey Prize collections — that have drawn on its pages.

Ownership

The Fiddlehead is published at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It operates within the university's literary publishing program, supported by subscriptions and public arts funding.

Issue 308: "Disability: The Revolution"

The Summer 2026 issue — number 308 — shows the journal's current ambitions. A special issue themed "Disability: The Revolution," it features almost 60 disabled contributors writing on revolution, across fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, reviews and art. It was guest-edited by Amanda Leduc, Phillip Crymble and Therese Estacion, with cover art — Self-portrait in Bed by Stephanie Weirathmueller — that sets the issue's tone. The magazine's website offers a full contributor list alongside excerpts and audio recordings of the entire issue: the journal now publishes its special issues as multimedia objects, not just printed pages.

The issue continues a Fiddlehead tradition of the themed special number — the Winter 2015 70th-anniversary issue, the 60th-anniversary issue with Carmine Starnino's celebrated letter about his first acceptance — while applying it to a contemporary cultural conversation. Eighty-one years after mimeographed poems for the Bliss Carman Poetry Society, the journal is commissioning large-scale statements on disability culture.

The 80th-Anniversary Tape

The 80th anniversary in 2025 produced a small archival miracle. Days before the celebrations, managing editor Ian LeTourneau was cleaning out a desk when he found an old tape labelled "Fiddlehead 50th Anniversary Feb 27/95." Finding a tape player, the office discovered the recording was still audible: Director of Libraries John Teskey, Dean of Arts Peter Kent, and former editors Bob Gibbs and Fred Cogswell, discussing the magazine's importance, its inception, and how it had changed over the years. The 1995 recording was published on YouTube for the 80th anniversary — thirty years of editorial memory, recovered from a desk drawer.

The Weekly Rhythm: "Stop! Look! Listen!"

Between quarterly issues, thefiddlehead.ca now runs a weekly drumbeat. The "Stop! Look! Listen!" series posts contributors' reading and listening recommendations — in October 2026, Kath Healing on Ólafur Arnalds's …And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness as writing music, Mike McClelland on Patty Loveless's country catalogue, Jenna Timmons-Oikawa on Joanne White's Bay Island Girl — alongside interviews (Poetry Editor Chuqiao Yang's July 2026 interview with 2025 Poetry Contest winner Melanie Power, whose "Ode to the Bakeapple" took the prize), book reviews, and features across creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry. A blog has run since 2010, and tables of contents for every issue since 1999 are on the site. The journal that began as mimeographed pages for private circulation now narrates its own busy literary life in public, every single week.

The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize

The magazine's institutional footprint extends into prizes. The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize — presented annually for books of poetry published by a New Brunswick resident and recorded in the New Brunswick Book Awards listings — is sponsored by the magazine, making The Fiddlehead not just a publisher of poets but a patron of the province's poetry. The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia's entry on the magazine, by Andrew Moore of St. Thomas University, frames the longevity as a rebuttal: a 1958 Tamarack Review editorial had declared that no literary quarterlies in the English-speaking world were "practicable in the long run" — prophetic for the Toronto-based Tamarack, which folded in the 1980s, but disproved by The Fiddlehead's continued perseverance, attributed to its flexibility and its open-mindedness toward new talent.

Digital Presence

The journal's website at thefiddlehead.ca provides information on submissions, subscriptions, and current issues. Its history is documented in its Wikipedia entry, in the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia, and in scholarly accounts of Atlantic Canadian literary culture such as the Journal of New Brunswick Studies.