Naava Smolash is a white settler from a working class immigrant family. Her writing appears in Studies in Canadian Literature, West Coast Line, LitHub, Everyday Feminism, Briarpatch, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Her essay "The Opposite of Rape Culture is...
To celebrate the upcoming Growing Room Festival 2020, we are chatting with a few festival authors to learn more about them and their work until the festival rolls around. Isabella Wang chats with some of the talented young writers who will be performing at this year's...
In the following interview, Manahil Bandukwala chats with poet and fellow festival author, Liz Howard, whose debut poetry collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. The author spoke about contamination and poisoning in...
Publishing’s most avowed history is usually an American one with an all-male cast, peopled by scions like Scribner and Knopf who ruled from corporate thrones. But in an engrossing new book, Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (UTP), noted scholar,...
Next up, Chimedum Ohaegbu chats with Jillian Christmas, who is—in addition to being a festival author—one of the programming committee members of Growing Room 2020 and the host and curator of the opening night event at Fox Cabaret. The writer and artist is a force in...
Cassandra Blanchard’s debut poetry collection, Fresh Pack of Smokes, is an immersive, intimate account of drug addiction, love, sex work, and survival on the streets of Vancouver. These are prose poems that shake with urgency, deftly stacking vivid imagery which...
Kai Cheng Thom’s latest book, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World (Arsenal Pulp, 2019), is an expansive and intimate collection of essays and poetry on transformative justice and radical love, both in and beyond queer activist...
In this interview, Manahil Bandukwala talks to Amanda Leduc ahead of her appearance at Growing Room 2020. Read what Leduc has to say about “Disney-fying” fairy tales, writing non-fiction, and nurturing community. Photo credit: Trevor ColeTo celebrate the upcoming...
Our 2020 Fiction Contest judge and Growing Room Festival author, Rebecca Fisseha, is the author of Daughters of Silence (Goose Lane Editions), which was listed among the most anticipated fiction titles of Fall 2019 by CBC Books and 49th Shelf, and one of Quill &...
Room editorial board member Tamara Jong spoke to Bindu Suresh about her novel 26 Knots and getting that first line just right, early writing influences, and which actors she'd like to see play her characters if her book became a movie. A former journalist and current...
Pre-order Our Next Issue
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?
Order our previous issue
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.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Be the first to know about our contests, calls for submissions, and upcoming events.
Join us on Patreon
Seeking members who love literature, events, merchandise, and supporting marginalized creators.