Reading Room

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...

Short Forms Contest 2021: The Winners

Short Forms Contest 2021: The Winners

The results are in. Many thanks to all those who've submitted, and to our incredible judge, Michelle Good, for her careful consideration and kind words about each of these pieces. Our warmest congratulations to these three winners of our 2021 Short Forms Contest!...

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.

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Cover image for Room Magazine Issue 49.2, Science. Art by Candace Cosentino of an old-fashioned computer monitor with a bounty of dandelions growing from it.

ROOM 49.2 SCIENCE

I hope this issue makes you curious and furious, leads to 2 a.m. Wikipedia rabbit holes, fulfills urges to seek out knowledge-keepers. Quickly or slowly, dive in: -ologies of all varieties await you.

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ROOM 49.1 No Future for Who?

In Room Magazine 49.1 No Future for Who?, we are really asking. We are coming in hot. We are causing a scene. We are being unreasonable. We are not fucking around. We are not taking “no” for an answer. “No” is the only word we still know. For who? For who? No.

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