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Submit by Tuesday Aug. 5!
DEADLINE EXTENDED. Take the long weekend to polish your cnf pieces. Send us your best personal essays, biographies, travel writing, and more for a chance to win $1,250.
This year's judge:
Siavash Saadlou
Read an interview with him on the contest guidelines page.
Entry fee (includes a one-year print subscription):
CAD $35 for each entry from Canada
CAD $45 for each entry from elsewhere
CAD $15 for each additional entry, no limit
Head over to our contest guidelines page to learn more.
Monica Kim,
2025 Long Poem Prize
co-winner
 Past contributor Manahil Bandukwala talks with the Long Poem Prize winner about queer living as counter-archive, burning haibun form, and poetry as witness.
MB: Memory, especially bodily memory, recurs throughout the poem. What do you consider a poem’s role is in combatting against forgetting?
MK : I think about Lucille Clifton’s poem, “samson predicts from gaza the philadelphia fire,” written after the police bombed MOVE in Philadelphia, killing eleven people and destroying homes in the Black neighborhood. Clifton ensures that through her poem—and through her legacy—readers will never forget this atrocity, in spite of American history classes choosing to exclude this. Her poem, weaving in Black and Palestinian solidarity, is also a current reminder of that long history of solidarity. A poem is a witness, but a poem can also ensure that what was witnessed is not forgotten or erased, and unearth what a dominant narrative cannot.
Read the rest of Monica Kim's interview.
Hamish Ballantyne,
2025 Long Poem Prize
co-winner
 Past contributor Camille Lendor talks with the Long Poem Prize winner about the varied mediums of local history, learning from patterns in music and literature, and form (or lack thereof) in long prose poetry.
CL: Like corn and history, “Boomtimes” uses errantry to explore the interconnectedness of capitalism, B.C. locales, landscapes, geopolitics, Indigenous populations, languages, and histories of labour exploitation (or, as you aptly put it, “evisceration”). When you began writing this piece, topically, where did you begin?
HB:
I got pretty curious about salmon canneries as an early instance of industrial resource extraction on the pacific coast. And I was thinking about many people I know from work in tent encampments, how intimately some of their experiences were tied up with the fortunes of resource extraction. And the poem is also about the vehicles of those histories: local newspapers, archives, tourist brochures, self-published memoirs that I pick up in bookstores or diners, on the ferry, etc.
Read the rest of Hamish Ballantyne's interview.
Katherine J Barrett,
#231 fiction contributor
 Courtney Bill talks with her fellow issue #231 contributor about the rhythm of a short story, the trivialization of disordered eating, and the misunderstood.
CB: This story is host to various unnamed characters—the Team Lead, the racquetball player, the roommate, and the mother—who all inform the protagonist’s relationship with food. I see from your website that your writing often focuses on community. What are your thoughts on community in fiction, both within the stories we write and for ourselves as writers?
KJB: Community will save us when everything goes south! Seriously, I think community, defined in many ways, is the bedrock of our lives and therefore our stories. In “Half,” the narrator’s relationship with food keeps her apart from her small community but, again, it is and is not about food. She craves connection. We all do. I also write a lot about our non-human communities: plants, animals, ecosystems. That’s a challenge—how to write without being didactic or twee—but vital. It’s absolutely vital to give the land and our non-human kin a voice. And to listen.
Read the rest of Katherine J Barrett's interview as well as an excerpt from her story, "Half."
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