Spring 2022 Showcase Leigh

Marina Leigh

A Photographic Series in Conversation with Micro Essays on Home, Loss, Deterioration, Haunting, and Love

Throughout this photographic series, I write into different ideas, concepts, and narratives while also providing context of the image to the viewer. I want these photographs to step further than the image itself and relate to my work as a writer, but also fit into a conversation about our shared human experiences with trauma and joy and memory. Over the course of the last year, I struggled with a loss of control—over my physical health, over the traumas of the people I love, and over the losses that I’ve faced myself—but I do have control over the visual image and representation of these abandoned homes and structures. This project allows me to reflect on the traumas and joys I cannot write about directly. Largely, I’m thinking about haunting—the South as a haunted space, the home as a haunted space, and our bodies and memories as forms of haunted spaces, working with the term ‘haunted’ as memory of all the good and the bad. Memory is not a thing that vanishes into thin air once the house is abandoned or the body dies. Events and emotions that occurred will always have occurred, and they will always be a part of that space, regardless if the space remains.

Marina Leigh is a queer, biracial writer and photographer. She was born and raised in Reno, Nevada. She earned her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, and is the 2020 recipient of the University of Mississippi’s Grisham Fellowship in poetry, where she is currently earning her MFA. She currently serves on the editorial board for Yalobusha Review, and has previously served on the editorial board for The Meadow and as the copy editor for Insight Magazine at UNR. She has had poems and visual art published in several journals, including Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Product Magazine, where her poem “Cherubs in the Clouds” was the poetry prize winner, and Truckee Meadows Community College’s literary journal The Meadow. She was also the inaugural UNR English Undergraduate Chapbook Contest winner, resulting in the publication of her chapbook, Wild Daughter.