WEST

Following the death of her photographer and climate activist mother, Regan Law, a pregnant writer residing in New York City, decides to take a road trip west across America with her friend and lover, Anna – a NY photographer and conceptual artist – to gather material for a book and film exploring Rae's family history and the pioneer legacy.

Together with their filmmaker friends, Jack and Jin, they travel west across the country, encountering locations significant in the narrative of American history, including, amongst others: Youngstown, a post-industrial town, where they meet a group working on a process of regeneration; Lake Erie, where they meet a lawyer attempting to establish a Bill of Rights for the polluted lake; Pepin, Wisconsin, the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Independence, Missouri, the 'jumping-off' town for pioneers. Each location offers an exploration of American history, interrogating its mythology and its reality, and introduces individuals and groups – activists, amateur historians, farmers, hikers – involved in the narrative of both.  

Following a violent encounter at the Standing Rock oil pipeline protest in South Dakota, the group begin to trace a different route that tracks the atrocities of colonialism through the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains. 

West is about the layers of history that form the narrative of countries and families. It is about the body and the land. It is about the trauma of our past and the hopes for our future.

Extracts have been published on Mercurius and New Writing.