Traditional Iranian dishes take hours to make. Each family has their own recipes and preferences passed down from previous generations experimenting in the kitchen, but I did not grow up in a culture that allowed for time to be spent making food, unless you were...
“Memories and Where to Keep Them” is the honourable mention for Room’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest 2020. Before my mother left, when my mind was still small and pink like two fists held together, we saw a miracle in the sky. I was still allowed outside then. Whenever...
The results are in. Our warmest congratulations to the three winners of our 2020 Creative Non Fiction Contest! Photo credit: Carissa D'andrade The results are in. Our warmest congratulations to the three winners of our 2020 Creative Non Fiction Contest! Room's 2020...
Finally—here is the shortlist from our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest as selected by our esteemed judge, Amanda Leduc! Our heartfelt congrats to the following six essayists. Photo credit: Carissa D'andrade Room's 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest: The Shortlist...
Whale Dreams I Wet basalt back of whale passing one hundred feet from the deck, makes me call you to run come from front gate to the sea side to watch this great token made manifest in the glassy March sea. I kneel down on these rocks astonished at the sight of...
Photo credit: Carissa D'andrade The longlist is here! Here are the thirteen longlisted essays from our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest, which closed back in June. Room's 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest: The Longlist “A conversation with my grandma about two oceans...
Galaxies After Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” Ladies and gentlemen, please. Thank you, thank you—yes, the magic tonight was real. The trick, this time, is mine. No magician can saw me in half—without bunny or top hat or spell cast, I have simply vanished. Call me the first...
The first emotion I remember feeling was anger. Then anxiety. Then determination. I was in Toronto, attending a concert with a friend I had met online years earlier. It was the first time that we had occupied a public space together in person; the first time I could...
After the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks—unarmed African Americans killed by white police officers—the protests that followed, and all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the time for a global reckoning for...
What else did Barthes write? I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me. I learn to pull the signified from the mouths of other women who once looked like me. I learn to pour water from one vase into another heirloom. There is the slight residue...
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ROOM 49.3 NO CANADA
In the new era of CanCon, as feminists and writers it is our task to reject this Canadian exceptionalism, this too-comfortable back-patting. How can we begin to imagine alternative arts economies, Indigenous economies around art, that start with treaty, that align with BDS? What art, what literature, would such a system free us to create?
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ROOM 49.2 Science
Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.
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