Creative Non-Fiction

Making Moccasins

Making Moccasins

“Making Moccasins” is the Third Place Winner for Room’s 2023 Creative Non-Fiction Contest. Of this piece, judge Tajja Isen writes: This is a blazing, deeply felt essay about pregnancy, miscarriage, and family-making. As well as being a moving act of remembrance, the...

This Time It’s Personal: An Excerpt from 2023 Creative Non-Fiction Judge Tajja Isen

This Time It’s Personal: An Excerpt from 2023 Creative Non-Fiction Judge Tajja Isen

Our 2023 Creative Non-Fiction Contest is judged by Tajja Isen! A writer, editor, and voice actor, Tajja Isen’s first book, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, was published in 2022 and was named a Best Book of the Year by Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and Daily Hive. Whether you’re looking for inspiration or a good read, enjoy this short excerpt from Isen’s Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service!

The Tower Will Not Hold

The Tower Will Not Hold

The Tower Will Not Hold is the third place winner for the 2022 Creative Non-Fiction Contest, as selected by Judge Luna Ferguson. ----   I’m sitting on the rooftop of Venice Suites, enjoying a view of the hot sand, the slate-coloured water, the skinny palm trees,...

Love Letter to a Vancouver Special

Love Letter to a Vancouver Special

We are an unlikely couple. Me, twenty-three and adrift. The House, so planted in the earth, its walls sagging from decades of rain. When I move in, I worry I’ll find ghosts: not only the spirits of my ngin-ngin and yeh-yeh, but the spectres of other things lost to time.

BIPOC Art Ecosystem

BIPOC Art Ecosystem

The BIPOC Art ecosystem is a creative environment that is inspired by the structures, functions, processes, and symbiotic relationships found on the land where we live. As well, the ecosystem honours the wisdom and teachings of the host nations on unceded territories to which we (Karmella + Lexi) are uninvited guests. We are a part of centuries of microscopic transformations and changes, and we carry on the work of our ancestors as we centre art and community-building in the continuous fight for liberation, sovereignty, and environmental justice.

I Can Feel Him Breathing

I Can Feel Him Breathing

I Can Feel Him Breathing is the honourable mention for the 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Contest, as selected by Judge Dr. Njoki Wane. _____________   In the morning I stand in front of the bedroom closet, half-dressed, wrestling with the sliding door. The door won’t...

Texture, Illness, and Metaphor

Texture, Illness, and Metaphor

My introverted grandfather used a code to let my extraverted grandmother know when he was running out of steam at parties: fists by his side meant he had some energy; one fist in the air, spotted across the room, meant he was running on steam; both raised above his head meant he was finished and had no energy left for socialization.

Brown Girl in the Ring

Brown Girl in the Ring

Amidst all the swirling anxieties of the pandemic, I had almost forgotten I was brown. I had forgotten that the eyes looking out from above my mask were deep inky pools which so often failed to reflect familiarity and belonging.I had forgotten that, while my hands were gloved and hidden, my sepia arms betrayed my origins in a sun-washed and sun-dried land.

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