a moment in the day: train

As I work at the computer, I'm listening to the old-time radio detective show Let George Do It. In the episode, detective George Valentine and his assistant Brooksie are meeting with client Casey Foster in the desert on a dark evening.

The voice of Casey Foster: I want to show you something. The most beautiful view I've, I've ever seen. Eh, get out, Miss Brooks. Come over here.

My mind fills in the blanks, watching Brooksie get out of the car and follow George to where Foster stands in the gloom of the radio night.

George: View? View of what, the black shadows of black sand in the middle of a black desert?

[Coyote sound effect]

George: Ah. We're going coyote hunting, eh?

Foster: Over there. In the moonlight. There. By the old, abandoned siding. See?

The voice of Foster is old-time radio actor Junius Matthews, one of the most distinct, most OTR voices out there, the epitome of a cracked, old codger—and his character is, well, a cracked, old codger, so in love with trains that he's endeavoring to buy a railroad for a million dollars. 

Brooksie: A freight train!

Foster (voice full of excitement and reverence): That's the number two engine. Makes the night run.

And it's just a moment. My mind says, wow, what a profound, poetic little statement! The train makes the night run. Like streaming through the dark, a train, in all its mystique and wonder, can power the night, can bring it to life.

Then: wait. 

That's not what he's saying with that line. He's saying that this train runs at night.

Ah. Well. I let the episode stream onward, and I enjoy it as it goes, but I leave that line uncorrected in my head. Because, oh, how pretty it is when you hear it wrong, and it's always worth taking poetry wherever you find it.

______________________________________________

That episode ("This Ain’t No Way to Run a Railroad") of Let George Do It can be found on the podcast The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio archived here.

By the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my old-time-radio-themed novel Who Killed One the Gun? can be preordered now.

a moment in the day: a shot

I'm just pulling the garbage out of the can to get it ready to take it to the curb when my sister texts: "Hey mom and I are gonna have a shot for dad in a min can you too?"

It's August 11. Five years—five unbelievable years long—since our dad left this world. My mom loves good tequila and doesn't drink it much, but she has a nice bottle that she and Edina once in a while, for a special occasion or remembrance, will take down and pour a shot and toast.

I start going through the cabinet. What can I use? There's an open bottle of red wine on the counter but it's 95 degrees out at seven in the evening, and somehow a shot of something hard seems less of a fireball to your stomach than red wine right now. The phone—the land line, we only talk on the land line—starts ringing and I run through the house to grab it. Mom's on the other end, ready with her little shot glass with Edina close by. I tell her I'm looking for what to use, and I pull down from the high cabinet in the kitchen the bottles my hand can reach. 

A pretty blue bottle that turns out to be gin. A brown bottle that looks to be less than a shot's worth of rum. Mom says that Edina says that I can use "three fingers of milk" if I want. That sounds better than the gin.

"I've got Cointreau!" I say and find a pretty shot glass in the lower cabinet and pour. 

I don't know where to go for this moment. I don't want to stand in the kitchen next to my garbage bag. I go out into the dining room, then through to the edge of the living room. There's nothing of Dad in here, but Mom and Edina are waiting, so I stop, and I realize that what I was doing was moving toward the spot in the corner of the living room with Nicholas's painting and Nicholas's ashes, one loss pinch-hitting for another.  

I say, "OK!"

"I'm clinking with Edina," Mom announces. And then, "I'm clinking the phone!"

I clink the phone. "I'm clinking the phone!"

The phone's plastic so it's more like a clack.

And now a sip. Sweetness that tweaks at my nostrils and burns down into my stomach.

"Edina shot," Mom says. "I'm sipping."

"I'm sipping," I say.

"You know, your dad liked Cointreau," Mom says.

And I am so happy. I didn't know that. Or if I knew that, I forgot it. I just remember that when Dad was drinking he liked Scotch, which we don't have. 

I raise my glass to the fact that Dad liked Cointreau.

After we hang up the phone and Mom and Edina go off to make nachos, a fitting dish for a Dad day, I linger to sip a little longer, not yet ready to get back to taking out the trash.

Book Cover: Blackbird Whistling

Blackbird Whistling is the second book in a duology written by Dian Greenwood. Book number one was Forever Blackbirds, and I had the privilege of not only watching that book come to life over many years in our writing group, but designing the cover and interior for its spring 2024 publication. I wrote about the process of creating the cover here.

Back when we were in writing group together, Dian was writing one story, but that one story morphed into two over time. I knew when I offered to design Forever Blackbirds that I'd get to come back and design Blackbird Whistling as well, and now, here I am! It's been so lovely to delve into the story of Marta Gottlieb again, and to take the design we came up with for her story and extend it into the next generation.

With a series of any kind, whether there are two or twenty books in it, you want a consistent look. When it came time to start on book two, I went back to book one for my first inspiration.

And as I had with the first book, I let Dian be my guide. With some projects, I do the concepting on my own before bringing in the author or publisher or client, and with some I let them take the lead. Sometimes it's somewhere in the middle. I asked Dian what she was picturing for this second cover, and she said (with some helpful input from fellow writer Judy Reeves) she was interested in focusing on a landscape again, bringing the blackbird (or blackbirds) back, and adding a new element: gravestones. And in particular the wrought-iron crosses that are prevalent in the part of North Dakota where a lot of Dian's saga takes place. Some info on them is here.

The first thing I did was go on the hunt for wrought-iron crosses. It was difficult to find ones that were royalty free and that we both thought would work. 

When I found something we liked, it came courtesy of Jo Naylor on Flickr Creative Commons. Here's a quick side-note. Just now when I dipped into my files to get this credit, I found I hadn't adequately labeled the original photo. I was pretty sure it had come from Flickr and I was pretty sure of the photographer's name, but when I went to the site and tried to search the original file name, nothing came up. I tried to google the file name. Nothing came up. I went into a bit of a panic because what if the photo I used for this cover was not a free use photo at all? Could I have made that mistake? This led me to a two-hour search, page by page, through her photostream until I found the picture again. But during that search, I found out that the photographer, too, is a book cover designer and writer. Here's her website if you want to check her out.

The next step after finding a photo to work with was to photoshop out the background to isolate the two wrought iron crosses (see the little one behind?). Then I assembled a few very early samples to get us going. In most of the samples I'll share in this post, the iron crosses are going to stick out unnaturally against the background. That's because it took a while to choose our landscape and I didn't want to tinker with the crosses to integrate them until we had officially decided what that landscape was.

I started, actually, with the landscape from book one. The original image for that cover was quite wide, which allowed me to use a completely different portion of it for this early prototype. I liked the idea of the two books being able to sit side by side and show that they take place in the same terrain. I brought back the type treatment from book one as well and gave Dian a few examples of how we might add the crosses to the meadow (she explained that these crosses can be found scattered in fields, not just bunched up in cemeteries). For blackbirds, Dian was interested in a flock flying in the sky, so I found and added those as well.

The original title of book two was Safekeeping. Which is not a monstrously long word as is, but bringing back the style with the big, sweeping first letter made our title smallish on the page, so I also experimented with breaking Safekeeping into two, which is a convention that is often used on book covers.

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention, which you can see in these samples, is that after I photoshopped the background from my crosses, I extracted the smaller cross and photoshopped it into a completely separated cross so that I could move it around.

Then looking around for usable imagery, I came across a gorgeous picture of a songbird perched on a dying flower. On impulse I grabbed it and added it to my early design and sent a couple more samples. I loved Dian's direction of the field and crosses and sky with birds, but I worried that it needed something more.

I sent my samples to Dian and to publisher Laura Stanfill. Together, the three of us made up the team that was going to be helping birth this book. Dian liked the bird idea but wanted a blackbird, to be more in keeping with the story. She wondered about putting the bird on a gravestone rather than a flower and was interested in finding a sky that wasn't as dark and foreboding. She wanted more gravestones, more of a proper cemetery in the field. 

Side-note: it can take a long time to find just the images you want to use. You think, okay, I'll search cemetery. And then you get loads of closeups of young models draped theatrically across headstones, dressed like vampires.

I tried some new samples with different skies, more gravestones, a couple different blackbirds I found. All of these samples were rough with the gravestones sometimes floating on the field because, again, I wanted to pin down a layout before going in for the detail-work.

Laura had some great feedback that we might want to keep the crosses small enough in the frame that their names aren't readable, out of respect for the families of whoever was buried there. Dian was interested in finding a different bird and a sky that was more serene. The bird I had the most in my samples was probably a baby, very fluffy and unkempt. I went back to look for a blackbird that everyone would love. I was unhappy with landscapes I had found thus far. As I said about my cemetery search, a lot of this project was me sifting through hundreds of photographs looking for the perfect images, images that would show what we wanted to show, balance nicely in the frame, integrate well into the scene, and not have copyright issues. That last one is very important, and narrows down the places you can find images by a lot. Even so, you always think it will be easier to find the right images to work with. Sometimes it takes forever.

During that forever, we had a bit of an update. The title of the book changed from Safekeeping to Blackbird Whistling. All the more reason to find the perfect blackbird for our cover. I searched through photos of birds, skies, landscapes. When I found what we liked, I worked to integrate it all. The final step was Dian's suggestion to change the secondary text (the blurb and "a novel") from the peachy color I'd been using in my most recent samples (a color that came from the shoulder of the new blackbird) to pink. And we finally had our cover.

I love that sweet blackbird!

Blackbird Whistling comes out in just one month! September 2. Dian has a launch event at Broadway Books in Portland on September 10, with conversation partner Joanna Rose. More info about Dian and all her books is on her website here. And here's a tiny taste from the book.

*

Angus takes me back to a time when farmers like Great granduncle Herman had all those kids in order to work the farm. An era when folks abided by faithfulness to farm, family, and God. All decisions were based on what was best for the crops, the farm, and the overall good of the family. When young people fell in love and married, they were expected to adhere to the same rules. The way I’ve lived my life and Jennifer is living here—taking off with her grandmother on what could be seen as a harebrained adventure—stands outside their code of conduct. College and living away from the family home is likely contrary to what’s acceptable. Angus, however, is a century past due in terms of picking up the plow and hitching the harrow. . . following a long succession of family who worked this land, living and dying here.

a moment in the day: fourth

Lying in bed in the mostly dark listening to the occasional boom. This was, of course, a very different Fourth of July. Not devoid of fireworks but nothing like the war-zone bombast of the past. 

Good.

I'm already fading away to sleep, but the relative quiet of the neighborhood tonight takes my brain to two places. First to the fact that we, at least in these more thoughtful parts of the country, just don’t want to celebrate this fraught history and tormented, tormenting place. And second, that I miss the little boy who I used to have to take into the bathroom with the loud ceiling fan and sing to on Fourth of Julys past.

a moment in the day: book

Maybe it's the nitrous talking but I think I'm in love with this book.

I'm reclining in the dentist chair getting a filling. Maybe it's silly to do nitrous for a filling, but I haven't had to get a filling in forever and god, I'd probably do nitrous for a cleaning if I didn’t feel like it was excessive. Just knowing I could get a little gas while they were hunting around in my mouth made the days leading up to this less stressful. Nitrous in my nose and an audiobook in my ears, anything to keep my brain occupied, to force it away from doing that thing where it thinks about the gruesome things they're doing in there, in my mouth.

Jessica Anya Blau is filling my ears with words. Her book is Shopgirls, and right now the girls are in a car, singing an ode to the air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

I started singing loud and clear, pushing my voice out through my nose the way Barbra Streisand does.

"Dear Jesus, Air-Freshener Jesus, help us find a spot—a spot—a spot—big enouuuugh for this carrrrrr."

How is it that I feel good and relaxed right now? Maybe it's the nitrous or maybe it's Air-Freshener Jesus, or maybe it's the fact that my dentist and I talked books before she went in for the novocaine jab. Told me what she's reading right now (Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything), told me she bought it because of a staff recommendation at a bookstore, told me the best way to buy books is from the staff recommendation written on a shelf-talker hanging from a shelf in an independent bookstore. "The best way!" she said. I said, "It's because you're getting a recommendation from a human who you know loves books!" And she pointed at me and fist bumped at me in the dentist chair.

Now as I lie with her hands in my mouth, I can hear the murmur of her voice, and the hygienist's voice, through the sound of Shopgirls in my ears. Chatting as they work. The murmur of the dentist sounds distinctly like, "in the book" and I realize with some nitrous-heightened sense of profundity that the dentist is talking about books while I'm reading a book so I have book on top of book in my ears. The murmurs somehow tell me that they're discussing Tell Me Everything, their conversation sparking off of our own. I'm fixated on their murmurs even as I'm able to concentrate on the shopgirls in my ears, and the fact of this moment seems to tell me everything about the world, at least about the good part of the world, and the dentist could be distracted by her book like I'm being distracted by my book but I don't care! Sometimes in the middle of this high stress world, things can be beautiful, and because of that, I'm certain that my book and the dentist's book, they're both the very best book in the whole wide book.

a moment in the day: fan

Ninety-one degrees, and my portable air conditioner is fighting the added heat of my second-floor, poorly insulated attic-turned-office at the very end of the work day. I don't know why I didn't think of this yesterday when it was ninety-six, but now I'm hauling out the box fan in an attempt to drag some of the cooler air over from the quarter of the room that the air conditioner's magic reaches.

Plug the thing in, start to walk away, yank the plug out somehow with my foot, step back over, plug it back in. Angle the thing toward my desk and then go sit down into the rush of relative comfort.

And it occurs to me. This is the first time I've taken the fan out since Nicholas. This is the first time in I couldn't say how long—years maybe—that I turned on a fan and aimed it at me instead of at a little warm body curled sleeping on his pillows at my feet.

Book Cover: Love

A while back, I was contacted by writer / publisher / literary powerhouse Jenny Forrester to design a cover for a new project. I was excited to work with Jenny because I love her writing (particularly her beautiful memoir Narrow River, Wide Sky) and her magazine Mountain Bluebird. 

Her new book was going to be called The Book of Solitude: The Art of Cherishing Spaciousness. From the beginning of the project, she had an idea of what she wanted the cover to look like. She was interested using handmade paper as the background, and she knew roughly how she wanted the text to be presented over that background. 

The minute she mentioned handmade paper, I thought, I know exactly what to do. I contacted friend and fellow writer Beth Kephart, for whose book Wife | Daughter | Self I designed a cover using her husband's beautiful art back in 2020. Along with being an elegant writer and teacher, Beth makes hand-crafted paper! She even wrote a book about it: My Life in Paper.

Beth's handmade paper is beautiful and she makes journals and other lovely things and sells them through her Etsy shop here. I contacted her about Jenny's book project and she found us some gorgeous paper for Jenny to choose from, and when Jenny had made her choice, Beth photographed it for my use.

She told me, when she sent the pictures, that it had photographed darker, grayer than the actual paper and gave me permission to alter it for my use. I did a lot of work on that paper, actually, lightening it, brightening it, removing the background. That took some doing because I wanted to leave the paper edges looking delicate and as beautifully... I don't how the word for it... tattered as they are. Then Jenny wanted her book to be square, so I photoshopped the rectangular paper into square.

Jenny was interested in the title text swooping through the layout. She even sent me a sketch of her thoughts. When I'm working with an author or publisher very hands on, I love stuff like this.

I explored fonts and colors and experimented with laying the text out in a way that had Jenny's swoop in mind. I sent her samples that included one with a circular title as well.

When Jenny first contacted me about the project and we were starting to explore possibilities, she was still deep in the process of writing the book. Time went by and I worked on other projects. A year went by, in fact. When she was ready and came back to me to continue working, the title had changed. It was now Love with a subtitle of The Art of Cherishing the World.

She said, "I love the flowing of the waterfall of the title. 'Love' in a waterfall will be a challenge but maybe?"

It was too much of a challenge to make look good, but if I let the subtitle be the waterfall, love, particularly with the slant of its letter V, was the perfect word through which the waterfall could flow.

I tried that love with different fonts and played around with the space between the letters...

...until I found a layout we both liked. Then as a last step, Jenny asked me if I'd be able to make the text look debossed (the opposite of embossed, where the lettering is pressed into the paper). To do that, I experimented with adding shadow and lightness until it looked right. The hard thing about this is that the text is light yellow and white. Lighter colors tend to pop and dark colors recede. Even when the light and shadow are applied correctly, it tends to create an optical illusion where one minute it looks debossed, the next it doesn't. Next I played with the lettering so that it wasn't all one shade of yellow or one shade of white across the words, and I also brought up a little of the texture of the paper underneath to add to the effect.

In the end, we were both happy with what we had...

...but then the project took an eleventh hour turn when folks Jenny consulted with didn't like our doing the cover against a paper background and we went back to square one.

Plot twist!

Or, if you're talking about a project in terms of one to ten, maybe we could say square five? We kept the fonts and the layout, lost the paper and debossing stuff. Lost some of the text too. She decided to remove the mention of the book award finalist and the blurb snippet and add a tagline: as ideological battles escalate, what are we to do? We discussed an illustration of the mountains, which is not only a prominent figure in her book but a strong part of her, if you'll excuse the markety expression, brand.

What we ended up with was a much simpler, elegant style cover, and my final touch was to add the sun shining through and behind the big O in Love.

Love: The Art of Cherishing the World will be out this coming August. And in the meantime, Jenny is putting out yet another book (I don't know how she does all that she does): a writing instruction manual and manifesto called Brilliant: The Art of Literary Radiance. She will be in Portland celebrating its launch and her wonderful literary magazine Mountain Bluebird on June 6 and 7 at BOLD Coffee and Books (start time 7 PM). If you're in Portland and free, come out and have a gander at the many lovely things Jenny has been doing. More information on Jenny is here.

And here's a little snippet of Love:

*

Adam kisses me when I sit down again, puts his hands on the small of my back which isn’t small but in his large, capable, and calloused hands feels small. I wish I were free of body shame like the activists in the disembodied bubbled digital world, but I’m only human … raised in particular ways … having had particular experiences inside my body and because of my body…

Later, when I tell my friend named Fun about Adam and his hands, she says, “Those men who work with their hands …” I tell her Adam is meaty with a yummy belly, that he’s sturdy, strong. Fun says, “I just love a meaty man.”

Adam doesn’t push his tongue into my mouth, the way some Adams do. He’s a decent kisser with sweet, whiskeyed lips.

He’s shit-faced, he says. “But I can handle my liquor, I’m not saying that.” I nod. Of course, he can handle his liquor—that’s what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to be able to handle things, like everything, even the poison that is alcohol. The Devil’s Bar is the devil’s bar.

I say, “It’s fun making out with you.”

He takes a swig of his drink, and says, “We’re not making out.”

I listen to how people define things. I wonder what his definition of making out is.

“Kissing then?”

I’m painfully aware of My Pool Mate watching me and this public display of affection. I hope I don’t look too awkward, but the reality is that I’m in my late 50s and so is Adam and so, it probably disgusts some people to see us acting like teenagers. Part of me thinks, fight ageism, and the other part thinks, what in the actual fuck are you doing?