a moment in the life of my book: radio

I come down the stairs, teacup in hand, step into the kitchen. It’s a work day and I have a meeting in five minutes, zoom style. Time to top off my cold tea and warm it up.

I can hear my own voice coming from around the corner where Stephen’s sitting in his little office. It’s me on the radio. KBOO’s program Jonesy, which I recorded last Friday, a really fun conversation with host Ken Jones about my book and other books and film noir and old-time radio, a lot of talk about old-time radio, a conversation about radio coming over the radio, or at least streaming live out of Stephen’s computer.

I put my teacup in the microwave. Start it humming.

“Hey!” Stephen’s voice. “What are you doing down here?” And not off somewhere listening to myself, he means.

“I’m warming my tea before a meeting,” I call.

There's a pause and then he calls back, “I’m not listening to you because I’m listening to you.”

Fair enough. I pull my tea from the microwave and start back upstairs.

a moment in the life of my book: dream launch

In my dream, it's book launch night and I've just finished up with my event at Powell's. I am so happy. Everything went well. I read well. I answered questions well. I was surrounded by friends and loved ones.

Oh, but wait! We forgot all about the part where I sign books! 

I look around, and oh no, the crowd is leaving. The room already mostly empty. But we need to sign books! Powell's brought in all these books and they need to sell them!

Quick, I sit down behind a little table. Someone brings over the book cart and sets it up to the front and to the right of the table. The people who remain are trickling around the table, past the cart, not grabbing books, heading for the stairs to leave.

I lean forward over the table. Look at the front of the book cart. It's full of stuffed animals.

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(Book launch is tonight! I'll try to remember to sign books. Powell's downtown, October 7, 7 PM. More information is here.)

a moment in the life of my book: advice

We've been pre-celebrating a little. Thai food and an old film noir. But mostly, tonight, my brain has been wound up tight with where am I going to stumble over my words while reading Tuesday night and what question is someone going to ask that I won't know the answer to and what very good friend am I going to blank on a name for as they hand me their book to sign.

We walk into the kitchen carrying our empty plates. 

"Tell me again," I say, "what you said before?"

"What before?" Stephen asks.

"To make me feel better."

I've forgotten the words he used. By Tuesday night, I will have lost all the words that exist in my brain.

He cracks a smile. "There's nothing you can do to make it bad."

Like a little magic incantation.  

"There's nothing I can do to make it bad," I say. "OK."

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(If you want to see me do nothing to make it bad, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. More information is here.)

a moment in the day: thread

It's garbage day and I've dumped the recycling from the can to the bin, dumped the compost from the little kitchen container to the other bin, and as I set the empty compost container in the sink to soak, I go over to our calendar, tacked to the wall, to see if this week is a garbage week or a non-garbage week. The city takes the compost, the recycling, the glass every week, but the garbage only every other. I have garbage day notated on the calendar on every other Monday with a little g.

This Monday has no g. Not a garbage day. But my eyes tick to Tuesday, where Stephen's handwriting says:

Nicholas Day

The words hit like a warm, soft thud in my chest. A whole year tomorrow since we said goodbye.

I think about this as I drag the garden-clipping-and-compost bin down along the side of the house to the curb. My little boy. I should pay some sort of tribute. Share some pictures. What would I say?

What comes to mind is that I feel Nicholas in all the little beings I see, somehow. The squirrels that run across the fence with their question mark tails, the birds that hop in the trees.

I walk back from the curb and along the side of the house.

What comes to mind is, sometimes I worry that I let go too soon. Sometimes I worry that I held on too long.

As I grab hold of the handle of the big blue plastic recycling bin, I see the asterisked translucent threads of a spiderweb running from the bin to the fence. The spider sitting dead center trembles with the movement as my hand tips the bin up just so slightly and then stops.

I stand there holding the bin at that little angle for a moment.

Then set it back down. I'll take out the recycling next week.

a moment in the life of my book: first

My first reading is done. That's what I think as I walk, with my publisher Laura Stanfill, up the steps of movie theater four, where we just finished our presentation, and turn to go into movie theater three, where the novels and memoirs and poetry collections of the authors of the Sisters Festival of Books lie stacked up across a row of tables. My first reading, in public, from my actual book, not my manuscript-in-progress, but my actual, physical book (three weeks ahead of the official publication date but festivals get special privileges), is done.

Laura and I step past the tables of books and down the aisle, past the raked movie theater seats, to the little stage in front of the movie screen, to sidle behind another row of tables, and take a seat next to other festival authors who are waiting to sign books. And before I know it, someone is standing in front of us holding a copy of both Laura's book, Imagine a Door, and mine. Holding mine out to me to sign. 

It occurs to me that I haven't thought about what I'd write to people if they asked me to sign their book. My book. My book that is now their book. Back in the day when I signed copies of City of Weird, I sometimes drew a little cartoon of an octopus like the octopus on the cover. What cartoon could I draw now for Who Killed One the Gun? 

A... gun? 

I take my book from the woman's hand. I ask her name. When I put pen to paper, I write, Thank you for being at my very first reading.

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By the way, if you're in Portland, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. I’ll be in conversation with Margaret Malone (People Like You) and my reading will be accompanied by the crackerjack old-time-radio-style sound effects of foley artist David Ian. More information is here. My novel can be preordered now.

a moment in the life of my book: the number that got away

I'm sitting at my computer listening to the song "Pi" by Kate Bush. Her rich, sweet voice sings numbers over the pulse of the music. There's a hypnotic-ness to that pulse that seems to evoke the endless digits of pi as much as her voice does, singing the actual numbers.

The song was shared with me by a friend because a social post I made about my very numbers-heavy novel put her in mind of it. And listening to the numerals slide by, I feel a silly kinship with Kate Bush because of our apparent shared mathematical nerdiness. Most of this song is simply the digits of pi sung beautifully.

"Eight, nine, seven, nine, three, two..."

Then I realize in a blink! A name that I failed to create in the long list of numbered names for the characters in my book... One the Gun, Two the True Blue, Three the Goatee... with all the fun I had coming up with names for characters using that naming system, with all the available numbers and all the available corresponding rhymes, this name was there all the time and I didn't use it.

π the Pie. She could have been a baker.

Oh, man. I'm so sad I never thought of that. Why did I not think of that?

It's so strange, after all the time writing and editing and workshopping and editing again, to be in this place where the book is the book, not yet officially out in the world but set in stone, set in words and numbers and unchangeable.

Kate Bush sings, "Five, nine, two, three, zero, seven, eight, one..."

Pi runs to infinity, of course, but a song can't. How did she decide what number would be the last one to sing? How did she know when the song was done?

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By the way, if you're in Portland, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. I’ll be in conversation with Margaret Malone (People Like You) and my reading will be accompanied by the crackerjack old-time-radio-style sound effects of foley artist David Ian. More information is here. My novel can be preordered now.

Book cover: Purgatoire

The next Forest Avenue Press book to come after mine will be Liz Prato's novel in short stories, Purgatoire. Which is interesting because both of us had a connection to the press before we pitched our books. I'm their cover designer and Liz is their editor at large. When both Liz and I were considering who to submit books to, we both separately, unbeknownst to the other, had the realization that "my book is a Forest Avenue book." Not meaning that publisher Laura Stanfill would say yes to us since we each had a relationship with her and the press—because that was definitely not a given in either case—but that knowing the press as intimately as we did, Liz and I could tell that our books would fit well into the Forest Avenue catalogue. And both of us knew deep down that this was where we wanted our books to go.

I love that we had this same thought around the same time and that, joy of joy, Laura said yes to us both.

Here's the official description of Liz's book:

In 1910 Sabé Parella makes the journey from northern Italy to southern Colorado to join her husband who went ahead to work in the mines. But when she arrives along the banks of the Purgatoire River, he is nowhere to be found. As discrimination, extortion, and Prohibition close in on her family, the men succumb to drinking, crime, and mental illness, while the women find strength in themselves, and in each other, to survive.

Based on Prato’s immigrant ancestors, Purgatoire is a novel-in-stories spanning several decades that traces how the shame and secrecy of one man’s abandonment haunts a family for generations. Prato weaves a hopeful tale of sisterhood and the complex relationships between parents and children, expectations, reality and our true desires.

I was excited to work on this cover because I know and love Liz. I've done cover work for her before, actually, for her story collection Baby's on Fire, and the Forest Avenue anthology she edited, The Night, and the Rain, and the River. For Purgatoire, Liz mentioned that she was interested in imagery of a bridge:

My thinking is that there be a bridge over the Purgatoire River. The bridge does myriad work in terms of metaphor—a bridge between countries/across the ocean, between cultures, between Trinidad and Aguilar, between the spirit world and the human realm. And all the characters are crossing a sort of bridge in their lives—they're crossing into something else, while leaving another life behind.

I was intrigued with this—and with a packet of materials Liz put together for Laura early on in the editing process for her book. The packet told the story of the story of her book, in a sense. It detailed ways in which her true family background informed the story, and the research she did around the real and the fictional story. The packet is so cool! Full of old photographs and documents and postcards and newspaper clippings. In there was a photo of the actual Commercial Street Bridge over the Purgatoire River.

I liked the idea of trying to recreate this bridge. And in googling around to see if there was much out there, particularly an image that might be clear and detailed enough that I could try to build the bridge accurately, I found this lovely picture postcard

I loved, too, the texture and the way color worked in the postcard. It seemed like a beautiful way to show the time period in the novel without leaning too heavy into the usual visual tropes of historical fiction since Liz's book is definitely of another era but in less a historical fiction and more a lit fiction way. Not that historical fiction isn't lit, but that Purgatoire falls into a little different genre basket. As I started to build my version of the Commercial Street Bridge, I already had it in the back of my mind that it might be cool to style it like a picture postcard. Liz's packet of historical info was another reason my brain went in a postcard direction when thinking on how to frame this art—all the examples of archival information in there from when she did research for her book.

I started building the bridge by creating shapes in Illustrator.

Putting it all together and using other shapes to cut out and define space.

And then I built a landscape around the bridge using the original picture postcard as a model. The shape of the surrounding land...

Some clouds for the sky...

I liked the idea that you'd be able to see the river going under the bridge and then curving off on its way. As I worked, a color scheme happened sort of organically. I knew we might change it all as I started collaborating more with Laura and Liz, but in order to have something that would be fun to present to them, something more finished looking, I let myself follow the colors where they wanted to emerge. The colors came from a few different places, actually. First, they were a sort of more saturated version of the original picture postcard: blues and golds for water and sky. Greens in the landscape, an eggshell color for the bridge. Too, Liz had said she was drawn toward yellow, orange, gold, brown. I pictured brown lettering across a sky that started out in a wash of orangey gold and rose into blue. Finally there were the colors in the example covers she'd sent us that she liked - and these three in particular that she had selected for color.

Golds, peaches, blues. I liked the way the colors in The Antidote (super cool book, by the way) moved from a peach through gold, through green, and up to a very turquoise blue. And I liked that very soft icy blue in the sky from The World and All That It Holds. I'm sure all of these things informed the color that started to happen.

That color started out light, soft, as I started putting my scene together...

....and added a cat. This was an element that Liz really wanted for her cover. Luna is a recurring character in Purgatoire—and a special one. Not only is she a cat, she's an immortal cat! In wanting to include Luna in my artwork, I thought about putting her in the foreground with her back to us, looking out on everything.

I deepened the colors as I added a paper texture to my scene.

And then I experimented with some type treatments and sent a few samples to Laura to show the direction I was playing with.

I made samples without the cat, too, but let's face it: we weren't going to gaze out over the Purgatoire River without Luna. Laura liked what she saw and passed the samples along to Liz. Liz liked the layout of the bridge and landscape and the inclusion and position of the cat—but this cat was not yet Luna. She needed to be less fluffy, less rotund.

I also hadn't quite gotten the landscape of the area right. "I'd like to see the landscape along the river be less green-green, and more wild," she told Laura. She sent pictures that showed better what the area looked like. And she wanted more blue in the sky, which she felt would also make it feel more Colorado. She gave me thoughts on the fonts I'd played with.

The last thing Liz wondered was whether I could add a representation of a group of souls that form a Greek chorus in the book. I'd thought about this ever since I heard that that was an element in the story. What a lovely idea, a chorus of souls. But how to represent it on the cover?

I started on the easier updates. The blue for the sky, the wilder plant life, the thinner cat.

Honestly, I don't remember exactly how I got the souls to work. A bit of time has gone by between our finalizing of the front cover and my writing this, and some of that process is a blur of experimentation, me trying a lot of things and building on it as I went. I know I started by making a rudimentary human figure and then multiplying and warping it and taking those figures and overlapping them together.

Then it was experimenting with different levels of transparency, blurring, overlaying with clouds, stacking multiple layers and blending them together.

Meantime as the ghosts did their ghost thing, Luna was going through her own transformation. 

There was also more experimenting with fonts and refining of colors, but I don't want this post to be fifty pages long. In the end, we came up with a cover that I hope does honor to Purgatoire the place and Purgatoire the book.

Purgatoire will be out on April 26, 2026. More info on the book is here. More info on Liz Prato is here. And here's a taste.

*

Steve Scavina

January 1935

I drive Joe’s blue Model A across the muddy Purgatoire when the sun’s about as high as it’s going to get in the winter sky. It’s not real cold for late January, but the piñons up on Fishers Peak are dotted with snow. I don’t take my eyes off the road, but you can’t miss the peak rising over Trinidad and all these damn mining towns, like it got nothing better to do.

Joe’s in the passenger seat and Perina’s in the spacious back with her cat in a basket on the seat. I’m the one driving because Joe’s blind in one eye from a fight he was in a while back. Rumor is something to do with goats, a bad price, a bad slaughter . . . no one but Joe and the guy he was in the fight with know for sure. It’s not like he’s blind as an apple, so he can go around Aguilar just fine, but he shouldn’t be doing the twenty miles to Trinidad. Especially since we’ll probably be coming back at dusk.

The reason we’re in Joe’s car instead of in my car is because my car is a rickety old Chevrolet truck. All three of us—and the cat—would’ve had to squeeze in the worn front seat, with dust and chill blowing in through the cracks. Besides, Joe would be embarrassed to be seen in it, thinking it makes him look pitiful. But the reason for our trip to Trinidad is pitiful. See, the reason I’m driving us all from Aguilar to Trinidad is because we’re going to the hospital to see Sabé.