Room publishes original fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art by folks of marginalized genders, including but not limited to women (cisgender and transgender), transgender men, Two-Spirit and nonbinary people. We encourage writers with overlapping under-represented identities to submit, and we don’t want writers to feel restricted by gender or genre labels, so if you are unsure if your work is a fit for Room, please get in touch.
Each issue of Room is edited by a different editorial team. Each time you submit to Room, you will be read by different readers and editors with different editorial tastes and preferences.
Our next call for submissions opens May 7th!
48.1 Humour
Fill Room with laughter for the one and only “Humour” issue! Genocides, heat waves, floods, fascism, an ongoing mass disabling event: the world is burning and it’s no laughing matter. But humour can be a weapon, a coping mechanism, a sacred instinct that keeps us alive and living amid the most devastating conditions. We laugh to not cry. We laugh to
critique. We laugh to remind ourselves that we aren’t powerless. We laugh to offer tenderness to a room, to ward off despair, to open our chests and lower our shoulders—so we can be brave. We laugh to play, to remind ourselves
we still can.
Send us your funniest unpublished poems, fiction, non-fiction, and black-and-white art. Send us works that uplift to role of laughter in resistance, break comedic genres, explore the uses and limits of irony, upend white supremacist and ableist origins of standup—tongue-in-cheek, deadpan, alive-pan, cringe, unbelievable, absurd. Reinvent tragicomedy. Insist on the transformative power of the pun. Break open the anatomy of a meme. Send us stories about your favourite inside jokes, the funniest member of your family, the importance of play and improvisation in survival, fighting back, and building a new world. Make us believe again in the blithering power of satire in a world that satirizes itself. Make us roll on the floor spitting out our drinks, until we cry.
Edited by Jane Shi, Sadie Graham, Tara Preissl, and Gitanjali Bal
This issue has a rolling submissions period. Submissions will close once our submission limit is reached, and will not open again until our next issue.
Submission Guidelines
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Before submitting, please read our About section to see if your work fits within Room’s mandate.
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Submit your work through Submittable. We do not accept submissions via mail.
- Submit only work that has not been previously published (in print or online). We gladly accept simultaneous submissions. If another magazine accepts your work for publication, please advise us and withdraw your piece immediately.
- Fiction and creative non-fiction: up to 3500 words, double spaced.
- Poetry: up to 5 poems, submitted in a single doc file, with each poem starting on a new page.
- Submit all work in 12-point font, Times New Roman preferred.
- Please do not send a second submission in the same genre until you have heard back from us considering the first one (Note: You may enter our contests and submit a regular submission at the same time so long as the materials are different.)
- We do not charge for submissions, with the exception of our annual contests, which also come with a one-year print subscription.
Book Reviews
We review fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, published by smaller Canadian publishers, in an effort to suggest intriguing and original new work for our readers. For funding reasons, we have to fill these pages with “Canadian” content; interested book reviewers who were born or reside in Canada can send their pitches to reviews@roommagazine.com.
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