Menagerie: Countershade Press

The culmination of twelve years of work, Menagerie is the final form of a project that began in 2014. A collection of loss, these five tales run the gamut of what we lose at our darkest hour. Friendships. Loved ones. Dreams. Our sense of self. Twelve authors and artists with ties to Olympia, Washington come together to produce a fantastical collection of lost things.

Featuring stories by: Caitlin Robertson, Cecilia Meade, Jonah Barnett, Samantha Kalweit, Marck Thomas Wilder, and Daniel Valdez.

Menagerie began in the winter of 2014, when black pleather jackets and Lana del Rey flower crowns were all the rage. With some college experience publishing literary magazines under their belt, Jonah Barnett (née Barrett) felt ready to take the next step and publish a full-blown book. Rallying thirty different student writers and artists together, Jonah designed a final product: a collection of illustrated monster stories titled Menagerie. Advanced reader copies were printed at Powell's Books with the help of Laura Stanfill and an "espresso book machine."

But book publishing is a full-on business, and these processes take time. Overshadowed by other projects (and well, an arts career and marriage), Menagerie sat on a shelf collecting dust for over a decade, promising one day to see the light of day.

Which would be... now.

Gathering some of the original band back, Menagerie: a Cluster of Loss brings together seven of the original writers and artists, aided by some new creative friends along the way. The simple theme of "monsters" has been replaced with a richer motif: the analysis of loss through a fantastical lens. The result is a hybridized soup of the old and new, a true menagerie of what once was and what is now possible. Menagerie, once a lost dream in and of itself, ironically finds new life as something found.