In 2022, I started aiming for 100 rejections a year. It was a way to trick myself out of the funk I fell into whenever a piece was rejected and force myself to actually open my rejection emails and move on to the next publisher. But even though I’ve been doing this for four years, this year was particularly hard. It was the beginning of September, and I’d already made 132 submissions and only received one acceptance, and I was wondering what I was doing. Which goes to show that our job as writers is to do the work, improve our craft, make the submissions, and let go of worrying about things we don’t control.
Over the next few weeks, I was longlisted for the Room prize, shortlisted for the Fiddlehead prize, had an essay accepted at the Brevity Blog and another accepted at Fiddlehead Literary Magazine. (I’ve never had a month like that before!)
After a month of nail-biting tension, my essay "The Language of Poverty," was chosen as the winner of Room Magazine's 2026 Creative Non-Fiction Contest. I felt honoured (and surprised) to receive the award. And incredibly touched when I read what the judge, Kai Cheng Thom, had to say about my essay.
The deceptively simple lyric structure of this powerful personal essay contains within a striking mastery of storytelling technique combined with a compelling thematic exploration of poverty, resilience, and the struggle to survive in conditions of deprivation. A miniature memoir rendered in powerful and absorbing vignettes, “The Language of Poverty” demonstrates remarkable economy of language without compromising emotional depth or complexity. This is creative non-fiction at its best. — Kai Cheng Thom
The essay will be published in a 2027 issue of Room Magazine.
