About Room

Room

Room (formerly Room of One's Own) is a Canadian quarterly literary journal based in Vancouver, British Columbia, featuring the work of emerging and established women and genderqueer writers and artists. Launched in 1975 by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society — also known as the Growing Room Collective — it has published an estimated 3,000 women and served as an important launching pad for emerging writers over its half-century of publication. It publishes short fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, art, feature interviews, and features promoting dialogue between readers, writers, and the collective. With a circulation of about 1,700, it is one of Canada's longest-running feminist literary journals. The current editor is Shristi Uprety; the publisher is Molly Cross-Blanchard. It carries the ISSN 0316-1609.

Overview

Room publishes quarterly, with each issue offering short fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and visual art, alongside feature interviews and standing departments that promote dialogue between readers, writers, and the collective — including "Roommate," a profile of a Room reader or collective member, and "The Back Room," back-page interviews on feminist topics of interest. The journal's contributors are writers and artists who identify as women (cis and trans), trans men, Two-Spirit, and non-binary people. Approximately 90 percent of the work it publishes comes from unsolicited submissions or contest entries, reflecting its commitment to discovering new voices.

Work that originally appeared in Room has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, and Best Canadian Essays, and has been nominated for National Magazine Awards. The journal's collective members are regular participants in literary and arts festivals in Greater Vancouver and Toronto. The journal is operated by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society, a not-for-profit organization, and its events take place on the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples — an acknowledgment the collective includes in its festival and issue materials as a matter of course.

History

Room was launched in Vancouver in 1975 as Room of One's Own — the name a nod to Virginia Woolf's foundational feminist essay — by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society, the Growing Room Collective. It emerged from the second-wave feminist literary movement of the 1970s, when women writers were creating their own presses, magazines, and distribution networks to counter their exclusion from mainstream publishing. For forty-plus years, the journal has published fiction, poetry, reviews, artwork, and interviews by women and gender-diverse writers, holding to its founding belief in publishing emerging writers alongside established authors.

The journal's name was shortened to Room along the way, but its mandate endured: to provide a dedicated space for women's writing and, as the journal's understanding of gender evolved, for trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers as well. Over the decades it published an estimated 3,000 women, many at the beginnings of significant literary careers. The collective structure — members participating in editorial decisions, festival organizing, and community outreach — kept the journal rooted in the feminist literary community it served, rather than in a hierarchical publishing house.

The journal also created the Growing Room festival — Growing Room: A Feminist Literary Festival — operated by the same society. The festival brought together writers and artists across disciplines: writing, spoken word, visual art, movement, and more, with programming committees, an Indigenous Brilliance team, and staff drawn from the collective's networks. Festival programs listed the society's board of directors, production and marketing coordinators, and volunteer teams — evidence of a substantial community operation behind the journal. When the 2020 festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, the collective transformed the planned programming into a special extended issue, 44.1 Growing Room, blending new and already published work from the artists, poets, fiction and non-fiction writers who would have appeared in person — including a keynote address from Kai Cheng Thom and an interview with Maneo Mohale. The reimagining, the editor wrote, necessitated concessions but also extended relationship-building with the featured writers and artists. The issue's credits thanked the many staff, programming committee members, and curators — including the Indigenous Brilliance team — who had built the festival-that-never-was, and acknowledged the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose traditional and unceded territories the work took place.

Content

Each quarterly issue contains short fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and art, with feature interviews and the dialogue-building departments "Roommate" and "The Back Room." The journal runs contests — including a short fiction contest — and about 90 percent of published work arrives via unsolicited submissions or contest entries, making the slush pile the journal's primary discovery engine.

The journal's aesthetic is feminist and intersectional: its pages have featured work engaging with race, colonialism, sexuality, disability, class, and migration alongside more intimate subjects, always through the lens of writers whose voices have been historically marginalized in Canadian letters. The "Back Room" interviews take up feminist topics of interest directly, while "Roommate" profiles collapse the distance between the journal's readers and its makers — a structural embodiment of the collective's belief that the literary community is made, not found.

The contest program and the journal's openness to unsolicited work mean that emerging writers regularly appear alongside established names — the founding promise, kept for five decades. Work first published in Room has gone on to be anthologized in the country's most prestigious annual collections and nominated for National Magazine Awards, confirming that the journal's discoveries hold up against the best of Canadian writing in any venue.

Coverage & Audience

Room is a national literary journal with a Vancouver base, read by writers, feminists, students, academics, and lovers of Canadian literature across the country. Its audience includes the emerging writers it exists to launch — for many, a Room publication is an early and meaningful credit — as well as the established authors, editors, and literary community members who form its readership and support network. Collective members' participation in literary and arts festivals in Greater Vancouver and Toronto connects the journal to the live literary scenes of both coasts.

With circulation of about 1,700, the journal's influence far exceeds its print run: its anthologization record, its contest alumni, and its role as a launching pad for emerging writers make it a significant institution in Canadian feminist letters. The ISSN 0316-1609 has identified the title in periodical directories since its early years, and its website's archive of editorial letters and features documents the journal's evolving conversation with its community across five decades of feminist publishing.

Ownership

Room is published by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society (the Growing Room Collective), a not-for-profit organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia, which has operated the journal continuously since 1975. The current editor is Shristi Uprety and the publisher is Molly Cross-Blanchard. The journal operates as a collective, with members participating in editorial work and in the broader literary community.

Digital Presence

The journal's website, roommagazine.com, publishes information about current and past issues, submission guidelines, contests, subscriptions, and the Growing Room festival, along with features such as the editor's letters. Its history is documented in its Wikipedia entry and in the festival programs and editorial materials published by the society — records of a journal that has held its feminist literary space for half a century and counting.

Recent Milestones

The journal relaunched in 2007 under the shortened title Room, with the tagline "A Space of Your Own" nodding to its original name. In 2023 the magazine ran a public fundraiser warning it would be in danger that October without meeting its goal, describing itself as one of the most integrally diverse spaces in Canadian literary publishing — a standing built over nearly five decades of publishing writers and artists of marginalized genders.