Canadian exceptionalism. “Canlit.” “Cancon.” For Room 49.3 “No Canada,” we are looking for poetry, prose, and art that offers a critical or alternate lens in this time of sentimental patriotism. For local stories, national anxieties, mixed feelings, and alienated identities. For writing and thinking in conversation with dissenting voices past and present: #IdleNoMore, Gidimt’en Checkpoint, Black Lives Matter, #StopTheStack, No Arms in the Arts, #CanLit Responds, the Postal Workers’ strike. We are seeking fiction about how systems fail us and poems about how we fail each other (and vice versa). How life feels here now. How writers and artists struggle to make a living, to live with themselves, as the cost of living rises, as our prizes and grants are funded by genocidaires. Work that refuses to take “the most beautiful place on Earth” at face value; that deconstructs the “true north strong and free;” that denaturalizes “natural” histories of settler colonial violence from Stanley Park to Canada Park; that don’t flinch from Canada’s complicity in waging wars in the Global South.
While one could describe this as an “issue” issue, we are equally interested in stories and poems that are concerned with the everyday, the intimate, the strange, etc.—humming with doubts, fantasies, and fears inasmuch as our everyday always is. In creative non-fiction, we hope to read researched essays that look outward and inward. Across genres, we would be very interested in multilingual and/or fragmented forms that refuse the colonial primacy of English-language work in Canadian literary journals.
International writers and artists: we welcome writing and art about borders, national identity, liberalism, liberation, and related struggles—from the psychological to the revolutionary—and we are especially keen on transnational thinking and Third World perspectives.
Underrepresented writers—including but not exclusive to women (cis and trans), trans men, Two-Spirit and non-binary writers who are Black, Indigenous, people of colour, queer, and/or disabled—are particularly encouraged to submit.
Before submitting, please read our About section to see if your work fits within Room’s mandate, then refer to the Submission Guidelines on how to format your work.
