In 2011, more than 27 million Canadians (81%) lived in urban areas, a reversal from over a century ago. The three largest urban areas in Canada – Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal – made up just over one third (35%) of Canada’s entire population. As a result of this rapid urbanization, the Canadian identity becomes unstable. Can Canadians construct “home” and “identity” in the dynamic city-scape and represent it effectively in creative literatures? Canada is marked by its pride in heterogeneity and difference. As cities expand, is the heterogeneous Canadian culture susceptible to homogeneity? Is there a visible or audible effect of this urbanization upon the creative aesthetic? Do contemporary authors effectively use style and form to examine this tension within Canadian culture?

In The Canadian Postmodern, Linda Hutcheon elucidates the complexity of the Postmodern: “Postmodern would seem to designate art forms that are fundamentally self-reflexive––art that is self-consciously art (or artifice), literature that is openly aware of the fact that it is written and read as a part of a particular culture, having as much to do with the literary past as with the social present.” How then do these tendencies manifest in Canadian creative writing? Authors are asked to interrogate cultural structures and systems as a means to critically analyze the significance of their own dominant cultures; consequently, these authors and their works are relegated to the periphery. The Postmodern aesthetic, itself, is characterized by this self-same insistence upon the peripheral. Yet, can these marginal voices be effectively represented in literature? Are these voices in danger of being silenced in an urbanizing nation and world?

Writers of fiction, poetry, and drama are encouraged to submit a selection of creative prose (a 250-word abstract) concerning the Postmodern aesthetic, urbanization, or the construction of home and identity for a fifteen-minute presentation.