Click on the image to download ROOM in PDF!

Editorials

Navigating Care by Hattie Myers

The chorus of interlocking voices heard in ROOM 2.23 echoes [Albert Camus’s] experience of suffocation, exile, and threat while challenging us to revisit the “notions of our existence” and make new use of what we find.

Read more
Essays

Oedipus in Arabia by Karim Dajani

Ideas about the centrality of culture and collective in the structuring of the unconscious have been largely walled off, extruded from our canon. Nevertheless, they reappear. A central idea that keeps blooming in the cracks of concrete walls regards the…

Read more
Art

Francesca Schwartz

I am interested in the word, the image, the symbol. I am in love with bone. I am fascinated with the body and the end. The body is an impermanent landscape which we cannot truly know until we have also…

Read more
Community Projects

The Things They Wrote

Sharing our stories helps us to understand our experiences and begin to move forward in our lives. One year after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world’s healthcare system, the Things They Carry Project was launched, offering free online writing…

Read more
Essays

Lightning Sketch by David Morse

After a few seconds’ struggle, it comes to me by degrees—that time at our last visit when I sat sketching her mother’s house. I can summon the feeling of sitting down on something—I don’t recall what—the sensation of my drawing…

Read more
Poems

The Stages of Grief: A Guide by Kim Curts Mattheussens

Kim Curts Mattheussens studied German and English literature at Ball State University, the Katholische Universität Eichstätt, and Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität Münster, and creative writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. She is an alum of the DISQUIET International…

Read more
Community Projects

@ Work

Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy created @ Work, an exuberant documentary public art installation that includes fourteen life-size canvas banners depicting images in oil of essential workers who were so vital to the survival of the city and all of…

Read more
Essays

A Parable for Our Time by Rachael Peltz

I have been thinking for some time now that I’m glad my parents are no longer alive. It would break their hearts to witness what has happened to what my father used to describe as “America, the best country!”

Read more
Community Projects

Canvassing as Political Therapy

NOPE: Neighbors Defending Democracy is an all-volunteer group based in Washington, DC. Canvassing for Democratic candidates in battleground states, they approach voters with a respectful curiosity that seems related to the stance the analyst takes in practice. Surprisingly often, this…

Read more
Essays

Small Details by Limor Kaufman

When Z. was away at a psychoanalytic conference in Rome, her patient D. came into her home office for his Tuesday-afternoon therapy appointment. He probably sat in her waiting room for a couple of minutes, then walked into her office…

Read more
Poems Photo by Sabian Symbols

To Sing in the Presence of Quaking by Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh teaches creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her eighth book, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2022.  Her collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press)…

Read more