Volume 31.3

Glass Houses
Andrea Warner

The old adage that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones is fairly sound advice, but it’s hard to follow. I don’t know about you, but I’ve thrown my fair share of sharp pebbles—sometimes out of jealousy, sometimes out of anger, but almost always from a place rooted in fear and loneliness. This is the first time I’ve edited an issue of Room, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I’m relatively new to the collective, and I wasn’t sure how I would carve out a theme from the hundreds of submissions we get. But, as I kept reading, I found myself drawn to the stories and poems where judgments, right or wrong, seemed to be the beating heart that unified each piece.

Ultimately, I decided to call this issue Glass Houses. The theme sort of reached up its arms to me as each piece became a commentary on the critical nature of our society. The majority of pieces I’ve chosen tend to explore how judgment is really just the result of the ways in which we add up our lonely moments.

Bios

Jesse Gray is an MFA candidate in visual arts at the University of British Columbia, graduating September 2008. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Artist Statement:

We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of ‘the contemporary.’
                                Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty

In my practice I use the act of collecting (scavenging, foraging, garbage-picking, alley-scrounging) as an investigation into the hidden meanings and secret histories of discarded objects and things.

Susan Musgrave is the author of numerous nominated works of poetry, as well as several works of fiction. She has published and/or performed in virtually every genre, including non-fiction essays, anthologies, and books for children, theatre, TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine reviews, and is a regular contributor to literary juries. She lives in Sidney BC and Haida Gwaii. When the World is Not Our Home: Selected Poems 1985-2000 will be published by Thistledown in 2009, and a new novel, Given, by Knopf. She teaches in UBC’s Optional Residency in Creative Writing MFA Program.