The Capilano Review is pleased to invite submissions to its Spring 2024 Writing Contest, guest-judged by Renee Gladman.

There is an air moved in the open—in around the thing about us. Where we lived remained so, though there were occasional changes, what we called moves, of change of place or how we were there, would stay there and because I liked that, lived there.

Through these words from visionary thinker and writer Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), we understand that the lands we inhabit (be they grasses, cities, paragraphs, days, our own bodies) exist in a constant state of flux, moving as we move, changing as we change, all the time being made and unmade, being seen and unseen. In writing with and about the environments that encompass us, we form a relationship of drifts, contortions, and intimacies that shape the narratives of our experiences into speculations of care and wonder. This is a call for your meditations, your forensics, your elegies, your wanderings on the possibilities of ongoing and intersecting geographies. How do we write an evolving ecology that supports mutability? What will be the future forms of our habitations? Lyric essays, fiction, poetry, and other language-based interdisciplinary works are encouraged.

The winner will receive a $500 cash prize and publication in an upcoming print issue of The Capilano Review.

About the Judge

Artist and writer Renee Gladman is the author of numerous books, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Her collection of essay-fictions, Calamities, won the CLMP award in non-fiction in 2017. She received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021 and has been awarded many fellowships and residencies in support of her practice. My Lesbian Novel, a work of fiction and autobiography, is forthcoming in September 2024.

Submission Guidelines 

• Submission period: April 15–May 15, 2024
• Work must be original and previously unpublished 
• Submit up to 6 pages of poetry, prose, or other short experimental forms (PDF or Word formats only) 
• All entries will be considered anonymously. Please do not include your name or other identifying fields on your manuscript pages 
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere so that we can remove your entry from the contest
  

Submission Fees*

$25 for Canadian entries**

$35 for US/International entries 

*Submission fee includes a complimentary one-year subscription to The Capilano Review.
**Note: Submission fee is waived for Indigenous entrants. Please email contact@thecapilanoreview.com directly for alternate instructions to submit your work. 

Ready to submit? 

Upload your work via Submittable here.

The winner will be announced in August 2024.