Photos/Art

Room Magazine invites your visual/photographic work for our No Canada issue 49.3, edited by Sadie Graham, Micah Killjoy, Natalie Wee, and Vanessa Sanginiti.

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, editors Sadie Graham, Micah Killjoy, Natalie Wee, and Vanessa Sanginiti 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. We publish everyone but cis men; if you are a cis man, please do not 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. We are an international feminist magazine, and encourage writing and art submitted from all over the world. 

Submissions open March 11, 2026 and will be accepted on a rolling basis until we reach our submissions limit.  

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Guidelines

- In our art submissions, we are seeking works of glitches, surrealism, paper collage, photography, mixed-materials, and fabric-based art that supports our desire to knit together all the literary pieces we uncover during our submissions call.

- These are not images to illustrate accompanying writing, but submissions of their own standing. 

- Here is a collection of art that has recently appeared in our pages. Please take a look before submitting. 

- Submit up to five images (maximum of 1MB sized JPG or PDF) with a short paragraph about the work of art including: the title, size, medium and date. You can also direct us to your work online in your bio.