That’s it. Get it all out of your system, Amber.

It hasn’t been easy trying to get a copy of the review.  I thought of calling in SEAL Team 6 to breach The Fiddlehead HQ and secure their servers, but JSOC said they were busy.  I’m still hopeful that even braver individuals will step up.  Along the way, I was attacked by new friends Mike Blouin, Zilla Jones, and Carolyn Parsons on Canada Writes, who invited me to leave, called me unknown, unimportant, and self-important, compared me to a cockroach, then disabled all comments to the thread and nuked it from orbit, just to be sure.  Had I been faster with screen shots, we could have all been amused.  Sadly, I’m becoming familiar with the wokeist cult playbook:  if you’re losing, then start calling the enemy all the -ists, and if that doesn’t work, erase all record of the exchange, erase history.  Personally, I’m happy to have my public words stand for 1000 years.  The Wayback Machine will not be denied.  Special treat Amber McMillan deleted so many of her posts on The Fiddlehead Facebook apology thread that parts of it don’t make sense now.  Clever tactic, Amber!

For the woke among us, go to the nearest mirror and say, “I like attacking 80-year-old women whose only crime was serving readers and writers for many, many years.”  If you can do this without shame, you may be eligible for the 2023 Thug of the Year award from the Woke Stasi.  Before blasting the players in this scandal with all your healing-and-reconciliation-based hate, consider how the label “elder abuser” suits you.

I used to think the central question was, Are we allowed to give critical reviews of Indigenous writers in Canada?  But the more I paddle around this cesspool of bruised egos known as CanLit, the more I think the question might be, Are we allowed to give critical reviews at all?  I get it.  You want your new book to be a bestseller, but the possibility of a negative or even devastating review is critical to the integrity of the process.  If you want a guarantee of a positive review, get your mom to write it.

I realize that republishing the review risks damaging these women further.  It’s not my intention to hurt anyone, but this is about freedom of expression and knocking down censorship.  Fighting for the greater good is well worth the risk to any individual.  I’ve included links to people who said it better than I could.

Wayne Jones – Writing & Editing podcast – Episode 225 – A literary magazine, a woke editor, and the indigenous issue

Catherine Owen – Ms. Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws podcast – Season 9, Episode 5, 6, and 7.