REST/UNREST | 48.3

2025

Rest/Unrest

Unrest propels us to create from our deep discomfort with a world shaped by profound injustice. Rest gives our words and art the space to breathe and develop. Yet rest is also too often imposed through exhaustion, manufactured by institutions invested in silence and denial of their ongoing violence. Our hope is that these pages untangle those forces that deny us rest, while also celebrating the radical act of reclaiming it.

The tension between rest and unrest shaped both our theme and the production of this issue of Room.

What might have seemed to our readers and contributors like a period of rest behind the scenes was one of intense unrest. Our issue was delayed for months due to internal actions that affected our trust, timelines, and resources. In this distress, our collective embraced creative tension born from turmoil, the “/” hinging the words in our theme.

As you enter Rest/Unrest, “I hope you wake up to goodness,” as Mandy Shunnarah bids us in our first poem, evoking families in Gaza and a genocide that marked every day we laboured on this issue. Our commissioned author, Rayya Liebich, instructs us to “retrieve images of horror and destruction from the past 600 days and fold the pain down so it touches the centre of your heart,” because, as Tania De Rozario writes, “the world is a broken heart conspiracy theory invincibility complex.”

This issue also offers what Ella Nam Phương Nguyễn names “a form of / re do / surrender,” and, as Jan Zwicky tells Holly Lam in our interview, “Reorienting ourselves, then, will indeed involve a pause of sorts. But not to seek shelter from the storm.”

Our cover artist, Diana Nguyễn, stitches everything together, her textile work an invitation to dwell in the tension of our theme.

May you find rest as you engage with profound, necessary unrest.

–Rachel Thompson