As editor of The Fiddlehead, I apologize for the insensitive and ignorant review of Emily Riddle’s The Big Melt that appeared on our website. It should never have been published and we have removed it. The Fiddlehead has contributed to exactly the kind of colonial destructiveness that we should be working against. We should be supporting healing and resistance, not perpetuating racism and pain.
In Nicholas Herring’s first novel, his self-named protagonist, Herring, makes the following socioeconomic comment about lobsters: “You know, it wasn’t too long ago, you couldn’t get anybody to buy lobster. People used it as fertilizer in their gardens. Farmers would put it out on their rows. Eighty per cent of the market nowadays is cruise ships and casinos. The way I see it, lobster is just something people eat to distract them from the fact that they’re pissing their wages away” (260).
One of the best books I’ve read this year is D.A. Lockhart’s 2021 verse novel Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli, a virtuosic fusion of narrative, lyric, athletic, and mythological forms. Lockhart stages an epic Manitoban bonspiel as an allegory or roadmap for storytelling and sports as anticolonial resistance. As the Bearmen’s stones make “the world crack apart,” the collection is a story about literally remaking the world through curling — or maybe through stories about curling.
Congratulations to the fifteen finalists!
