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...
In this episode of the Indigenous Brilliance Podcast, we celebrate the long awaited Issue 44.3 Indigenous Brilliance going to print (IN FULL COLOUR)! In honour of this special occasion for the Indigenous Brilliance team, co-host Karmella Benedito De Barros shares...
Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer’s sixth book, awâsis – kinky and dishevelled, shimmers and cackles on each page. “awâsis” is the nêhiyawêwin word for “child,” but, as Halfe states in the acknowledgements, the word translates beyond the concept of a child to mean “being lent a spiritual being.” Halfe lends the reader a spiritual being throughout the text: the title figure appears in each of the fifty-three poems.
It's finally here: our 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Contest longlist! Congratulations to these thirteen writers, and a heartfelt thank you to all those who submitted work to this year's contest. Light and Shadow: One Painting, Two Lives, Emily McKibbon Zebrafish, Neive...
Joya Guzmán is a Mexican-Canadian emerging writer and translator at home in northern Mexico and the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples known as Vancouver. Her prose and poetry have been published or forthcoming in Acentos Review, Room Magazine, SOMOS Magazine, and others. Joya Guzmán is a nom de plume.
The results are in! Congrats to these three talented writers for being selected as the winners of our 2021 Fiction Contest! First Place: Of Dust, by N.B. N.B. is a queer friend, writer and researcher who cares a lot about the meaning of care. She is currently...
Always Brave, Sometimes Kind begins with “All the Children We Don’t Know,” an earnest story about Rhanji, a doctor managing hospital overflow and a staffing crisis in 1995. Told through matter-of-fact prose, Bickell tells readers that workers are “used and abused, underpaid and unseen” instead of having readers infer the physical and emotional impacts that healthcare cutbacks have on characters.
There’s a meditative quality to Entering Sappho, a centrifugal movement that emerges as Dowling reinterprets and remixes her understanding of both the geographical and the literary Sappho. So proceeds “Soft Memory,” my favourite poem in the book, a sequence quickly identifiable as a rewriting of Sappho 31 (her “Ode on the Beloved”).
In the same spirit as the opening page, the book wastes no time diving into Tobimatsu’s diagnosis, treatment, and the aftermath, allowing the reader to get some glimpse into Tobimatsu’s whirlwind of emotions after being diagnosed at the young age of 25. In a matter of days, the diagnosis forced Tobimatsu to make long-term decisions about her fertility, while doctors gave her heteronormative advice on sexual health and appearance.
When they started dating, Almost Daddy visited every month. He picked her up on Sundays after her cashier shift at the pharmacy, at Dundas and Spadina in Downtown Chinatown. She wore the same Niagara Falls coat, layering on a second jacket in the winter. Unlike most refugees that she knew, Guelph Guy had his own car. He’d pick her up and take her on walks by the harbourfront. To feel the humidity of indoor plants at Allan Gardens, to watch movies at the University Theatre on Yonge Street.
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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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