Interview

Room was excited to have the opportunity to sit down with Billy-Ray Belcourt to chat about obsessions, long form poetry, and struggle at the edge of language. Billy-Ray Belcourt appears at this year’s Vancouver Writer’s Festival in several events including The Poetry...

We were beyond thrilled to have an opportunity to chat with Dionne Brand about her latest novel Theory. Dionne Brand will be at this year’s Vancouver Writer’s Festival in a number of events including Fresh Fiction on Thursday, October 18th at Revue Stage. Dionne...

We're thrilled to have the multi-genre author judge our Short Forms Contest this year and took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her award-winning novels, using magic to explore the construct of gender, and the genre-blurring qualities in her work....

After living in New York for many years, Durga Chew-Bose returned to her hometown of Montréal to finish her debut collection of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood (FSG), which was subsequently named by The Globe and Mail and NPR as one of the best books published in...

"These queer stories are already ingrained in the land, and I’m just trying to find them. Things are never forgotten, they’re just forgone."—Joshua Whitehead. In an in-depth interview, Room's Jessica Johns chats with Joshua Whitehead, an Oji-Cree Two-Spirit...

Jessica Johns spoke with Arielle Spence, a queer, nonbinary aspiring writer and arts administrator originally from Coldstream, BC (unceded Okanagan Territory). They were the festival director of Growing Room 2017, Room’s inaugural feminist literary festival, one of...

Zoe Whittall on her recent “zeitgeist” book, sexual harassment in CanLit, how reviews for books by queer writers has changed since her early work, and what she is looking for in submissions to Room’s fiction contest this year. Zoe Whittall's third novel, The Best Kind...

Covering everything from the state of Canadian media to adult summer camps to racist marketing in the beauty industry, Koul’s writing is as thoughtful as it is funny. Her first book, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter (Doubleday, 2017), is a sharp...

Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme, will be a trailblazing collection in which sex workers share their experiential knowledge through the expressiveness, nuance, and beauty of poetry. Currently, Dawn and...

To celebrate the launch of Room 41.2 Changing Language, we would like to share the portion of the BackRoom and RoomMate interviews that didn't make it to print. First up, it's Nav Nagra's interview with Dainty Smith, whose work we discovered on Instagram last year. To...