we are immortal

The night Marianne disappeared the river was black, cutting through the darkness like a knife. Later, when they’d lost their faith in waiting, they stood together in the middle of the room. Jess had one arm around each of the boys and William pressed his face into her neck. The candles flickered. They were three shadows in a shadowed room, barely separate from each-other anymore.

WE ARE IMMORTAL is a collaboration: three short stories and a series of photographs which will be published together as an A4 magazine. The photographs will also be displayed, as posters, throughout the streets of Wellington – a changing and very public exhibition.

The photographs and stories echo the same core themes. There is something a noir, and a little NZ Gothic about it all; there is wildness and wilderness, frontiers and cowboys, and the vision of youth as trickster god. In one story a friendship is tested by the uninvited company of a moribund girl, in another a ghost watches a love triangle careen towards a desperate end. At the heart of each story is a river and the old house that stands beside it, the building falling slowly into weeds and decay. The stories are not separate vignettes so much as different angles of one truth – three versions of one truth, or perhaps the sheer inability to get a story straight once.

We’re in the throes of pulling the work together, but the life as a young artist rarely pays. That’s why we need your help. The money from PledgeMe will cover the costs of a first print run, poster-printing, and poster-placement.

Can you help? Aside from pledging, spreading word is a magnificent help, and if you would be interested in displaying posters or postcards of this PledgeMe project, please be in touch.

All pledges will be most gratefully received, and that's the whole truth of it.

This is the part where we have to die. This is the part where we are dead already. We are bodies in the ground. We are whispers to the worms and our bones are white like chalk in dirt and dust. There might be a bullet where my heart used to be.

 

JENAH SHAW is a writer and editor, who in the daytime juggles a dozen different jobs and writes fiction where she can. In 2009 she was awarded a writer’s residency, during which she finished the first draft of a novel she is currently refining (but this is too great and terrible a thing to talk about too often). Her work has been previously published online, in magazines and newspapers, and as part of a national anthology.

EMMA ANDERSON is a Wellington based photographer. In 2011, she completed a Bachelor of Photographic Design (1st Class Honors) at Massey University and since then her work has since graced a number of publications, including No, PULP, and ACHE magazines. Emma's focus falls on fleeting abstractions of light; her new darkroom works discuss the mediums scientific roots. Soon she will head to New York, where she will undertake new projects & extend her practice.

Also onboard is CLARE MORRISON, editor extraordinaire and exceedingly well read.

 

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