Nobody #2

Nobody is an indie print magazine about people, and the stories, places, and things they carry. We’re interested in looking beyond the headlines, into the lives of strangers, and at the everyday experiences that teach us about ourselves. We publish reported long-form writing, photo series, illustrated memoir, and other experiments in voice.

For Nobody issue 2, we asked our contributors to contemplate the shadowy-est of themes: Ghost. While we love a good ghost story, this issue is not—as you might expect—filled with encounters with the supernatural. Instead, we wanted to dig a little deeper to explore the things that haunt in other ways.

We wanted to ask: What has been forgotten? What is lost and not yet found? What feels just out of reach? We wanted stories and works that dealt with apparitions, absences, and archives; disappearances, relics, and memory. We ended up with a wide range of pieces that push and pull at the meaning of “ghost,” including Ed Ntiri’s examination of the legacy of Drum magazine; Claire Mullen’s essay about mothers, photography, and parallel realities, and Julia Bosson’s exploration of drinking, Berlin, and misbehaving women.

Other pieces wander from Ten Sleep, Wyoming, to Syria to the last Maoist villages in China, and remind us that ghosts are everywhere. If you listen, you’ll find they have a lot to say about what it means to be alive.