How had Marguerite ended up on that phantom island, the Île des Démons, crawling inside a dark cave surrounded by wild wolverines and hungry, snarling bears? What scandalous affair aboard the ship had led to her abandonment? These insatiable curiosities fill the writer’s mind, and she is swept away in research, trying to escape her own time by imagining life in the 16th century.
Poems in Beast at Every Threshold attempt both: the consumption of media and narratives is a process of looking for reflections of the self in another, while to “fluent” is to, in a way, translate between languages of love and touch.
In their debut essay collection, Lori Fox examines the intersections of queerness, class, poverty, gender, and mental heath. This Has Always Been a War is written in eleven essays and with each one Fox brings humour, urgency, and just the right amount of anger to conversations that demand attention.
At my loneliest I choose a lover for every corner of the city
the city is brand new to me and appears completely flat
the water is the bottom edge
The Audacity Issue, 45.3, is almost here! To celebrate, here’s an interview with issue commission, Marlowe Granados, where she talks with Jasmine Sealy about her acclaimed debut novel Happy Hour, measures of success, and the power of fashion.
With this issue, I set out to curate a collection of work that made me feel less alone. Which is maybe a leap from “Audacity,” but when you think about it, audaciousness can often be perceived as scandalousness, and scandal can translate to shame, which can make us feel isolated in a way that prevents us from seeing how our own brazen behaviour is echoed by our peers.
I wanted to choose something within my own creative wheelhouse, so at first I was thinking something around “shame.” But then I realized shame isn’t actually what I’m interested in; the really good stuff has to do with anti-shame. So I went down a thesaurus hole and threw some options out to the team, like “brazen,” “scandalous,” and “exposed,” but audacity seemed to be the word everyone connected with the most. I also like that when you say “The Audacity Issue” it sounds like an exclamation as well as a title.
We invite you to submit your unpublished work to the “Audacity” issue of Room—an issue we hope will dare to risk normalcy and politeness in the name of bold and uncompromising truth. “Audacity” will be edited by Molly Cross-Blanchard (author of Exhibitionist) and...