Though opinion has been divided on the culinary merits of the unfurled fern, the literary journal named in its honour has enjoyed a more consistently favourable reputation for more than half a century. The Fiddlehead, based at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, is an eclectic journal of poetry, short fiction, and book reviews. Although other literary magazines are produced in New Brunswick, including the Cormorant and St. Thomas University's Nashwaak Review, The Fiddlehead can legitimately claim its place as the oldest and most professionally and attractively produced. Since its quiet local beginnings as an informal, occasional poetry showcase, the journal has expanded to encompass a broad range of writing style and content from writers across Canada, the United States, Britain, and Europe. It grows increasingly inaccurate to characterize The Fiddlehead as a "regional" journal. Browsing through the contents of the fiftieth anniversary Fiddlehead Gold issue, one encounters household names in Canadian letters, many of whom were published here long before achieving wider success: Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Ralph Gustafson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Michael Ondaatje, Joy Kogawa, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, David Adams Richards, Carol Shields, and Raymond Souster, to name a few. In the past decade, issues have included work by such up-and-comers as Greg Hollingshead, Karen Connelly, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, and Nino Ricci.

The journal operates under an editor and board comprised primarily of members of the UNB Fredericton English Department and graduate students. Recent editors have included Don McKay, a poet who has won the Governor General's Award, and Bill Gaston, a novelist. Ross Leckie, a poet, has recently taken up the reins and produced two provocative new issues. But first, a brief foray into Fiddlehead history.

The journal owes its existence to the late Professor Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey, who in 1940 co-founded the Bliss Carman Society, a writers' workshop with a mission to revive and preserve the literary tradition that had flourished in the region in the late nineteenth century with the work of poets like Carman and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Bailey, himself a poet and historian, had studied at the University of Toronto, where he was heavily influenced by the then experimental work of the moderns, and wished to continue the stylistic innovations he had studied. In 1945 the Bliss Carman society collected their best work and printed a few copies in 8 ¹/₂y by 11y format, with a cover bearing a fiddlehead design by a local artist, Lucy Jarvis. Edited by Don Gammon, a member of the society, the early issues of The Fiddlehead consisted of ten pages with ten poems.

In 1952, Fred Cogswell, a poet and a professor of English, assumed the editorship and held it for over a decade. Soliciting work from farther afield and introducing short fiction and criticism, Cogswell nurtured The Fiddlehead's growth into a polished literary journal. By the end of his tenure, submissions had grown enormously and the original ten pages had multiplied to approximately sixty, published quarterly in small format by Villiers Press in England, with almost half of the content from outside the region. Still, the journal remained true to its original workshop character, an approachable venue for new and promising young writers to showcase their work alongside more established authors.

The Fiddlehead has undergone three changings of the editorial guard in the present decade, so generalizations about its current character must be made with caution. If there has been a common mantra in the missions or visions of its editors, it is that this is a journal with a disposition to listen rather than lecture. In his editorial for the Spring 1995 issue, Don McKay attributed the journal's longevity to its "breadth and eclecticism" and described it as one that "placed attention ahead of direction". Although it is widely held to be a journal that welcomes traditional forms while giving space and voice to more experimental modes, I would argue that- until recently-The Fiddlehead has feasted on tradition and fasted from innovation. These, however, are subjective and fluid categories, particularly within a postmodern context in which the conscious manipulation of conventional forms may be seen as a kind of subversion.

In the editorial in his first issue, in Autumn 1997, Ross Leckie describes his desire to perpetuate the sense of balance and inclusiveness that has characterized the journal:

"For more than fifty years the editors of The Fiddlehead have passed on this mischievous charm, a tradition and the echoing laugh of its subversion, the laughter being an invitation to both work and play with this tradition."

Leckie's description aptly fits his first two issues, Autumn and Winter 1997, which both contain a range of work that will be relevant to a broad audience and should lay to rest any perceptions of "regionalism" that may still exist about the journal. The concept of inclusiveness long held dear by The Fiddlehead appears now to be taking on a dimension of cultural as well as stylistic heterogeneity, which previously had been seen more sporadically. The poetry tends to be highly crafted and wrought with disciplined structures, whether in conventional verse and sonnet layouts or original forms. The fiction includes conventional coming-of-age, epiphanic-moment third-person short stories, dramatic monologues, re-workings of fable and folk-tale genres, and metafictions about narrative construction. To irritate the genre-purists, there is at least one postcard story classed as poetry and there are poems in verse structure that read as narratives.

From the first entries of the Autumn 1997 issue, it is apparent that this Fiddlehead is no shrinking fern. The poetry is preoccupied with fitting word to subject, navigating the fissured terrain between language and meaning. Mining words as raw material is the subject at some level of all poetry, yet these selections reveal a heightened consciousness of the materiality of language, its mutability, and often its ultimate failure. The consciousness of alienness and otherness that drives these poems is reinforced by the presence of other worlds, languages, and cross-cultural themes. Julie Dennison's two thickly sensual sonnets in honour of the nameless oriental concubines of two famous seventeenth-century French painters begin with an elusive, sexual presence/absence image:

Something foreign drifts into the sea of you and

drapes you all about in liquid blues. It stretches-

fur, silk, satin-feathers out into a peacock fan,

urging you to grasp it by the-longing, longing handle,

Alexandra Furman's "Nova Scotia" explores the paradox of searching for the elusive "word" amongst the ubiquitous "text" which is contiguous with body and the elemental world:

you might surrender your flesh to the deep

and discover the universe itself, inscribed

into your very bones: your skeleton,

that essential hieroglyph, telling

of your suffering and your pleasures,

that they were necessary as salt, legible

as this articulate silence.

The paradox of audible silence is related to the recurrent motifs of deafness and muteness that appear in many of the poems. Some explore the gulfs and miscommunications inherent in the search for expression, as in Margaret McLeod's "No wolves, I tell you", a poem whose light tone veils a menacing subtext about mistaken identity and masquerade, of the unknown cloaked in familiar garments. Others depict disparate parts that attempt to coexist in a single whole, as in Tom Wayman's parodically macho "Life with Dick", a conversation between a penis and its owner in which the organ does indeed have a mind of its own. Other poems play with language more overtly, as in David O'Meara's "Um". The title refers to the all-purpose sound we make when searching for a word or trying to fill space with sound: "Um. That's/ what's left, a sound both vague and brief./ A monument or offering to things unsaid,." This sets up his more complex and disturbing poem, "Omphalos", a search for lost centrality and origin. One of the final poems in the volume, Shawna Lemay's "The Fringes of Plot", turns to a visual medium to probe the source of language, reincarnating the voice of the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who was reputed to have painted still lifes-a particularly loaded term in this instance-none of which have been found. Lemay carefully constructs a palimpsest of irony in this poem about giving movement, shape, and voice to invisible life that has been "stilled" by the passage of time.

Lemay's poems are an appropriate set-up for the Winter 1997 issue, which continues in a similar vein of preoccupation with ruptures in communication, passage of time, overlapping of different media, and the dissociation of memory and history, both personal and cultural. The arresting cover design shows a detail from an installation by the artist Linda Bartlett, consisting of suspended sand-blasted light bulbs inscribed with text. Here text becomes a three-dimensional medium, conflating the boundaries between visual art and narrative. The opening poem, Christine Lowther's "Mother", is an emotionally eviscerating elegy by a daughter to her murdered mother, in which technology displaces subject and narrative. Images of her mother are available only via photographs and videotape, but these cannot capture certain features only expressible in poetry: "then in the film I saw you were wearing turquoise/ the next day I learned your eyes/ were hazel like mine." M. F. Tierney's "While a Storm" is another elegy, this time to paternal ancestors. The speaker watches her grandfather, "a bruise of a man", fade to silence and memory:

This, I think,

is how it must have been, how it must be,

the music playing into a silence

only those together in the glass

can hear.

If human communication often seems fragmented, immobilized, or lost, other life offers new insights. In Claude Liman's "Rendering the Pumpkin", vegetable vines vividly mirror the twisted patterns of familial relationships and ancestry: "Father, bone, son, vine still run/ long in his brain, still put down/ fierce root so far from their mounds."

The fiction echoes many of the motifs of the poetry: misunderstandings, mistakes, or actions and events that do not mesh expectedly with the surroundings are common themes. In Urs Frei's brief and striking story "Soap and Water", a shopkeeper watches his stock boy, an illegal resident from Mexico, violently but mercifully break the neck of a suffering cat while customers watch. Frei aptly and uncomfortably captures the disorienting balance of a violent act of mercy. Tilya Gallay Helfield's story "Nylon Stockings" begins with a misunderstanding in the opening line: "`He's dead!' my mother shrieked. `Not in bed! Dead!'" Eva Stachniak and Judith Kalman both set their narratives of Old and New World cultural/political conflict in the further divided setting of Montreal. The Guyanese writer Kenneth Puddicombe's story of inter-familial conflict treads a frighteningly fine line between loyalty and violence. These stories explore narrative as a process, a thing in transition born of conflict and the complication of diversity. The pervasive sense that human dialogue with ourselves and with our surroundings has been muddied by multiple perspectives contains a negative caveat of reinforcing barriers, as well as a promise of fertile new directions.

The Fiddlehead continues to fulfill its reputation for reflecting current literary climates with increased range and diversity in its pages. Poised between two millennia, the journal harkens back to history while re-working it with the tools of the present, an approach that likely would have pleased its founder. In the first ever Fiddlehead editorial, Alfred Bailey stressed the importance of a balance of discipline and experimentation in writing. He wrote in 1945:

"By continuing a tradition is not meant a slavish imitation of past themes and methods, nor does it mean a complete break with the past. To continue a tradition is to develop it to the point of contemporaneity. As this point is forever in motion the tradition must be forever unfolding by means of constant experimentation."

His vision, it seems, lives on. 

Clarissa Hurley is an actor and a books columnist for The New Brunswick Reader. Her story "Women & Linen Look Better in the Dark" recently won first place in the short fiction division of the New Brunswick Writer's Federation annual literary competition. She lives in Fredericton and Toronto.

Although her article shows how The Fiddlehead is more than regional-or simply not regional-this is the second in an irregular series of journal reviews of literary magazines in various regions. The first was Harold Horwood's on TickleAce, last September.