Reading Room

Review of Manikanetish

Review of Manikanetish

Originally published in French by Mémoire d’encrier in 2017, Manikanetish is the second novel by Innu writer Naomi Fontaine. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, it now appears in English-language translation by Luise von Flotow, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation. 

Tipping Point: Letter from the Editor

Tipping Point: Letter from the Editor

I find this in the words of these authors—as they speak to the generosity of nature, and the changes taking place in our climate. As they delve into their interior lives and make demands for repair, stability, and rest. Their writing contemplates moments of breaking that bring us all much closer, or much further away from the future that we desire. 

Becoming

Becoming

& the sea turns on itself, cracks the coveted

scales, bait & hook, leaves bones for the hungry

slides its rough back against home

Cover Art Contest 2021: Third Place

Cover Art Contest 2021: Third Place

This piece is the third place winner for the 2021 Cover Art Contest, as judged by Chief Lady Bird. THIRD PLACE: It’s Complicated, by Laura Silva "El hombre es Dios cuando crea. Years ago an esteemed teacher told me this while discussing art. It translates to “humans...

Cover Art Contest 2021: Second Place

Cover Art Contest 2021: Second Place

This piece is the second place winner for the 2021 Cover Art Contest, as judged by Chief Lady Bird. SECOND PLACE: 莫(Mò), by Kyla Yin "莫(Mò) represents absence. Something that isn’t there or isn’t able to be done. I was first drawn to this idea when the Chinese...

Cover Art Contest 2021: The Winners

Cover Art Contest 2021: The Winners

The results are in. Major congrats to the three winners of our 2021 Cover Art Contest! FIRST PLACE: Nimisenh mizhishawabi, by Sarah McPherson Raised in Thunder Bay, Sarah McPherson is a 2S Anishinaabe youth from Couchiching First Nation, currently completing an MA at...

The Breaks

The Breaks

Julietta Singh’s The Breaks is at once a letter, a memoir, and a work of narration. In addressing her six-year-old daughter, Singh’s storytelling is, for the next generation, “a map of broken things, a recyclable archive that will spur you to fashion other ways of being alive, of living.”

Letters to Amelia

Letters to Amelia

In the respective epistolary novels The Color Purple and The Quintland Sisters, authors Alice Walker and Vancouver native Shelley Wood enlivened a genre that many literary scholars had dismissed as anachronistic. Both works probed the exploitation of girls within their families and in greater society. 

Home of the Floating Lily

Home of the Floating Lily

Silmy Abdullah’s Home of the Floating Lily begins and ends with the idea of ‘home.’ The stories focus on characters wrestling with migration, containment, and forging new identities as ‘foreigners’ on Canadian soil.

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.

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ROOM 48.1 WITS END
In times of crisis, we laugh to offer tenderness, to ward off despair— so we can be brave. Gather round ROOM 48.1 WITS END and let humour be a mirror held up to the state of the world as we continue to resist.

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Step back with Room into the past, to parents, to childhood homes, and to people once known and loved; dig into themes of grief and healing; and ultimately explore what it means to come full circle in literature.

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