06/03/2025
We are pleased to invite submissions to our Spring 2025 Writing Contest guest-judged by Wayde Compton (.compton).
"Language, the vehicle of power, is a contaminated site."
– Roy Miki
Authoritarian regimes always mask and mythologize their aggression with familiar and regressive genres: reminiscences of a fabricated golden age; exaggerated narratives of an ostensibly oppressed majority; the framing of targeted groups as literally evil. Demagogues make use of cliche, “plain speech,” and “normalcy” as much as they use the materiel of militarized force. When resisting authoritarianism, it can be tempting to answer simplification with simplification. But more compellingly, in his 1998 collection of essays Broken Entries, Roy Miki writes: “Truth does not reveal itself in the voice of clarity and plenitude” and that we “have to be vigilant not simply to mime the given narrative, genre, and filmic forms through which dominant values are aestheticized." As Miki puts it, the answer is in seeking “a viable method for resisting assimilation, for exploring variations in form that undermine aesthetic norms, for challenging homogenizing political systems, and for articulating subjectivities that emerge from beleaguered communities — even at the risk of incomprehensibility, unreadability, indifference, or outright rejection.”
This is a call for work that celebrates the complex, the cross-genre, the formally mixed, the abject, the unstable, the code-switched (or the code-kept) resistant text. If your subject position, form, or style eschews easy categorization or reading, you are encouraged to submit your work.
The winner will receive a $500 cash prize and publication in an upcoming print issue of The Capilano Review.
Submit by June 30th: https://thecapilanoreview.submittable.com/submit
