Creative Non-fiction (Canadian Submissions ONLY)

This form is for "Canadian writers." Please use this form if you live within Canadian territories and provinces, or are a Canadian resident who lives overseas. Since our eligibility for national and local grants depends on a majority of our published content being Canadian, we kindly request that only Canadian writers use this form. Please see our international submission form if you do not meet the preceding residency/citizenship criteria.

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What does it mean to belong, whether it's to a place, a time, a community, a person, or something else entirely? Room Magazine invites unpublished writing and visual art, including graphic forms, for issue 50.1 on the theme "Belonging," edited by natasha gauthier, Gitanjali D. Sarker, Claire Diamant, and Diana Samu-Visser.

Send us your takes on belonging, not belonging, longing to belong, otherness, belonging on the fringe, belonging to the future, the past, the now. We welcome your imaginings, experiences, dreams, and fears of belonging in all their manifestations and intersections: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction as always, but we're also eager to read your comics, hybrids, graphic essays, and other forms that resist and defy the boundaries of belonging in the art world.

Underrepresented artists—such as women (cis and trans), trans men, Two-Spirit, non-binary, BIPOC, queer, neurodiverse, disabled, low-income, or having lived experience with sex work, addictions, or mental health challenges—are particularly encouraged to submit welcomed to self-identify in their cover letter to have their submissions prioritized. We publish people of all gender identities except for cis men; if you are a cis man, please do not send us your work.

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.

Submissions open June 24, 2026 and will be accepted on a rolling basis until we reach our submissions limit.  

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Guidelines:

• Your entry must be original and unpublished (in print or online)
• We accept submissions up to 3500 words. Longer submissions will be rejected automatically.
• Please submit in 12 point font. Times New Roman preferred but not required. 
• We gladly accept simultaneous submissions. If another publication accepts your work for publication, please notify us and withdraw your piece immediately.
• Please do not send a second submission in the same genre until you have heard back from us considering the first one (Note: You may enter our contests and submit a regular submission at the same time so long as the materials are different.)