Reading Room

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.

Phantompains

Phantompains

Drawing on Filipino horror and mythology, Estacion turns to monsters, ghosts, and beasts to navigate her personal pain and grief. Mirroring the loss of her own reproductive organs, she weaves in supernatural imagery of The White Lady, who weeps over the “dead uterus lying sadly on a / pillow looking very much like / the burnt pork belly at breakfast no one wants to touch.”

Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide

Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide

In the six-page preface, Principe takes great care to write that her book is not: an apology for suicide, a comprehensive review of suicide, a history of suicide, an argument for or against suicide, judgment, or a response to suicide that is without love.

The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak

The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak

Grace Lau’s debut poetry collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak is a love letter to the narrator’s younger self. Throughout the book, learning the language of care is embedded in the literal act of learning a second language as immigrant children. 

Music Box

Music Box

Music Box is the honourable mention for Room’s 2021 Short Forms Contest, as judged by Michelle Good. You can find the full list of winners, and what judge Michelle Good had to say about each winning piece, here. ------- Music Box I’ll begin this song with the click of...

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ROOM 48.2 TRAVELLERS

In ROOM 48.2 TRAVELLERS we reflect, dream, manifest. Join us in these human ways of time-travelling, from infancy to the future, through relationships and into surreal realms.

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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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