Aaron Burch and Austin Ross first became acquainted when Burch accepted one of Ross’s short stories at Hobart in 2018. Here, they discuss Ross’s debut novel, Gloria Patri, which deals with the aftermath of religious extremism and domestic terrorism.…
By Sarah Twombly • I am at work on a novel, and have been for more than a decade. It is autobiographical fiction, which is to say it’s about me, but also, it isn’t. The same way Einstein might…
Sibling Circus My brother was addicted to dog biscuits and this might have been how our act started. When our mother arrived, he’d pop one in his mouth, throw one to the real dog and then toss one to…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
Our therapist made us go camping. Her suggestion was to sleep outdoors for three nights and then get a hotel room. She said camping would force us to rely on each other for comfort, and the hotel stay would…
Each year we are privileged to be able to nominate work for anthologies and awards including Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers (Best Debut Short Stories), and…
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…
I’ve been listening to Brad Listi’s Otherppl podcast for years, very used to his voice and candor, but I didn’t pick up his fiction until he flipped the script and sat as a guest on his own show. In…
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
When my mother died, I inherited a sizeable goldenrod-coloured envelope; inside, I discovered birthday cards given to me from family members throughout my childhood, handmade get-well cards crafted by classmates upon the occasion of having one of several surgeries…
After my mother died, I received a package from my daughter of items my mother had kept over the years. In going through the parcel of keepsakes, I discovered my old birthday and report cards, newspaper articles, and a brown paper bag labelled Leslie First Haircut, June 13, a name I have changed and no longer claim, handwritten in blue ink by my mother. Of all the items contained in the envelope, it was this lock of hair from my first haircut that intrigued me the most. I thought about hair, the intimacy of saved locks, threads woven of family history, my relationship with my mother, the stroke that led to her death, roots both physical and familial, and the mother wound I’ve carried since early childhood.
Many themes came to mind as I formulated this essay. I considered the viability of DNA held within a strand of hair. I thought about the search for belonging and the bond between mothers and daughters. I contemplated the concept of “good hair” within my mixed-race family and extended family members. Objectification, the transatlantic slave trade, racism, mourning, memento mori, and hair as a symbol of shame, religious dogma, and spellcasting were themes that were also pondered and included in “Split Ends.”
I was left with the question of how I was going to formulate this material into a cohesive story. As a creative nonfiction writer drawn to hybrid forms, I decided to structure the material as a collage. The white space between segments acted as a pause, a moment for contemplation, a transition denoted by pairs of scissors – hinges that formed the connective tissue between the different story strands.
Of equal importance was the inclusion of photographs and images. They, too, provided moments of contemplation. Capturing different moments in time, the visual elements enhanced the text and provided a layer of richness to the collage.
ROWAN McCANDLESS is the Black and biracial author of Persephone’s Children. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in nonfiction (2022), and cowinner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book (2022), her award-winning writing has appeared in various anthologies, as well as print and online journals. In 2020, she received gold and an honourable mention with the National Magazine Awards. In 2018 she was longlisted for the Journey Prize and won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize. In 2022, she was a first reader for the CBC’s nonfiction contest and a judge for the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize. A jury member with the 2022 National Magazine Award for fiction and judge for the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Nonfiction Award, Rowan is also the creative nonfiction editor of The Fiddlehead. Currently she is completing a short story collection and developing another memoir. Find Rowan on Twitter @RowanMcCandless.
