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?

a moment in the life of my book: trumpet

I've written up a little blog post about a lovely moment in my day, a moment about my book, and I'm sharing it to Instagram. My publisher Laura Stanfill, in a fun, dinnertime strategy session recently, had the clever suggestion that I make a graphic to go along with these blog moments I like to write, and I have that all plugged in, now, and ready to release it to my Instagram feed. But my hand on the mouse hesitates and my cursor over the go button hovers and waits. 

The nice thing about just sharing a moment from my blog is that it always feels appropriately small. Discrete. Adding this graphic makes it seem so big, and for a second I feel oddly ashamed somehow. Like, who am I to trumpet this so loudly, to make it so big on the page? 

It is too much? It's too much. Is it too much? Stop it, you're going to have to get comfortable with playing your trumpet. You do have a book coming out, you are going to have to, you know, help promote it. What is it they say, that writers make lousy promoters? But it's that tension between the comfort of quiet and the wish to have our voices heard that makes us writers in the first place. 

Come on. Be a writer. Play your trumpet. Press go.

a moment in the life of my book: zing

The morning news is nothing but bad as I listen to the radio at the start of my day. But then there's a ding in the inside pocket of my hoodie. I pull out my phone. It's Liz Prato, Forest Avenue Press's editor in chief. She's texted both me and Forest Ave. publisher Laura Stanfill together. It's just the word yay with a line of exclamation points and a screenshot of my book up on Edelweiss.  

Gives me a little warmth inside. Edelweiss is the website where booksellers go to discover and order books for bookstores. Liz has found the product listing for Who Killed One the Gun? and has been so sweet to text me and Laura to say so. 

I put a heart react on her screenshot and text back, "Eeeeee" with three blue hearts. Blue because the book cover is mostly blue. 

This strange era, where you can communicate with people through color-coded digital hearts.

I put my phone back in my pocket and continue working at my computer, but in a moment there's a zzzing in my pocket, not a ding but a zzzing. Ding means a text and zzzing means a react, and I pull the phone out again. The zzzing was Liz putting a heart react on my three blue hearts. Hearts on top of hearts.

Then she texts, "It gets realer all the time."

And my goodness, it does. All the tiny, tiny moments in the life of this book that isn't even born yet. I text back with a word that's not just real but more than real: "I know! Surreal. Does it ever get less surreal / exciting / scary / exciting (with more than one book, I mean)?"

Because Liz is a veteran in the book game, with a short story collection, an anthology she curated, and two collections of essays, not to mention a novel coming out next year through our beloved Forest Avenue Press.

"I don't think so," she tells me, with a laughy emoji. She says that there are certain things you get more comfortable with, but every book is a different experience. She says she hopes she never gets to the place where she thinks, "Yeah, I've got another book coming out, that's just what my job is."

I hope that for her too. And if there's a book for me beyond this one, I hope it for me too. Even with the scary part. Because the scary part holds hands with the lovely part. I need to remember that. As I worry over bad reviews or no reviews or, OK, just bad reviews, because no reviews mean no bad reviews, and there I go obsessing over the scary part again. 

I put a heart on Liz's text and put my phone back in my pocket. I'm loving the dings and the zzzings but I have to get back to work. Even so, I sit for just a moment with the sweetness I feel that she reached out to me about my book.

And, zzzing!, there goes another one. Maybe Laura catching up with our conversation. I leave my phone for the moment and continue with my typing. The morning news is nothing but bad, but I have a heart in my pocket.

a moment in the life of my book: strategy meeting

What other publisher comes to you for a strategizing session for your upcoming book bearing a delicious homemade beans-and-rice lunch? Laura and I sit around my dining room table with bowls and spoons, paper and pens, a stack of one sheets for my book, a newly-minted advance reader copy. I have a list of things to talk about but we're mostly free-wheeling our conversation, bouncing back and forth with thoughts and ideas.

We do the math, me counting aloud on my fingers, and find that we're less than six months out from publication. That time frame seems both really long and really short.

Laura's telling me one of the things we want to research is mystery reviewers and bloggers. I point my spoon at her and say science fiction too, and she nods. My book is a genre-bender: literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi. The sci-fi part feels less conspicuous because the trappings of the novel are so soaked in noir and old-time detective fiction—but what are time loops if not sci-fi? It's funny, though, how time loops are science fiction and not fantasy. Time loops trace their roots back to time machine stories, and that is straight-up science fiction. But often time loop scenarios are allowed to exist with no explanation as to why the phenomenon is happening, whether through something sciencey or magical. The time loops just... happen. My book Who Killed One the Gun? pretty much falls into that category. There's a why-do-you-think-this-is-happening discussion in one scene, with one character posing a theory, but that theory is just a theory, and it, too, falls into a nebulous place between science and magic. Which... when you get deep down into it, doesn't all of science turn into magic?

That all sounds pretty poetic in my brain, but when I try to describe the way the genres of mystery and science fiction live in my book, I find it's hard to put it into words.

"I mean, my book might not be wearing a sci-fi dress," I say, "but it’s wearing its underwear."

Book Cover: The Fig Years

Last year, I was contacted by professor/publisher Heidi Nobles for a really interesting project. She described her outfit as a "grant-funded pop-up press," and the cool thing about it to me was that the plan was not only to publish a book, but to document, publicly, the entire process. 

You can check out the posts in their journey so far here. The press is called Road Trip Press, the blog is called Edits on the Record, and the project is made possible by the University of Virginia Libraries and The Jefferson Trust.

The first stop on Road Trip's road trip was to acquire a manuscript. When they put out their call for submissions, they said they were looking for "research-based nonfiction." The book they chose is by author/artist Jessica Doe. Here's a description of the book from one of the posts in Edits on the Record:

The book is a searing exploration of the relationship with food and mental health. Author Jessica Doe brings poetic insight and articulation to name a teetering preoccupation between gluttony and starvation that readers are sure to find illuminating. Doe describes her own long connection to Sylvia Plath’s work—and poetry at large—particularly through the lens of Plath’s obsession with food and Doe’s own eating disorders. Doe’s voice throughout is attentive, honest, and luminescent, and her work is vital for working out the messiness of food and being human.

It sounded fascinating! The original title was A Sudden, Wild Craving with the subtitle Sivvie, Food (Lack Thereof) and Me. Sivvie (also spelled Sivvy) was a nickname for Sylvia Plath.

To start things out, Heidi gave me a cover design brief that contained loads of direction, ideas, and input from the team.

They all, including Jessica, really liked the type treatment for Plath's novel The Bell Jar.

They preferred dark text on a lighter background. And maybe a mix of handwriting mixed with type. Jessica also had some tattoos that they thought we might utilize. She also is an accomplished visual artist, and Heidi sent me links to some of her art to peruse for possible use. 

I really liked the idea of referencing the Bell Jar font. But I'm also super conscious about issues of copyright and intellectual property, so I decided my first step would be to create some lettering that would echo, but not perfectly mirror, that typography.

To do this, I popped the cover of The Bell Jar into Illustrator and found a font that had similarities to that font.

Then I turned the font into shapes so I could manipulate the lettering, and I added the swirl ornaments. 

I experimented with some different directions for the cover based on the design brief and my email conversations with Heidi. To detail the process of each would make this way too long a post, so I thought I'd just share with you a few samples before I move on to the main concept that we ran with. 

There was a direction based on the original art of one of Jessica's tattoos:

And a couple concepts using Jessica's original art from an exhibition called Beguiled.

I was really intrigued by the Beguiled art. It felt really gorgeous and abundant but there's also something disquieting about the hanging fruit. The fruit is suspended from measuring tape, the kind you might circle your waist with to see if you've lost weight. The art's themes of food and eating disorders fit beautifully with the similar themes in the book. But the direction that resonated most with the team was the one that most closely connected to The Bell Jar and Plath herself.

My idea there was to lay the cover out very much like the classic Bell Jar cover. But instead of a stem running down along one side and ending at a single rose, it would be a stream of ink running down that same side and morphing into the shape of a fig branch. The ink would start as a solid stream poured out of a small jar, but as it ran down, it would become less solid and more like a wash of color across the surface of the cover.

It's funny. In the cover design brief, there is mention of figs as imagery strongly related to Plath, but by the time I was thinking through this last design direction, I had forgotten that. Not very knowledgeable about Plath (I'm embarrassed to say), when I imagined the ink stream turning into some sort of representation of food, I wasn't thinking about figs at all. I think I googled "Sylvia Plath Food" and then, thinking that grapes might be something intriguing to grow out of that ink rivulet, I impulsively googled "Sylvia Plath Grapes." And what came up was this haunting passage:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The quote was from The Bell Jar. I decided then and there that my ink stream would grow into a fig branch. And I also decided to read The Bell Jar. I downloaded the book from Libro.fm and listened to it while I fashioned my ink-wash fig branch.

I started by creating the simple shape of the branch with a single leaf and two figs.

Then I took that into Photoshop and started erasing parts of it away.

I created some small ink blot details to add to the watercolor-like wash of my shape.

And then added more detail as well as darker borders—the way ink and paint bunches up at the edges when water thins it out.

I elongated my stream of ink, added the pot and some more speckles of ink from the splash. Although I'd started this work in black, I decided to try it in green and, my favorite, a purpley color. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked, the quote said.

I put it all together and did some experimenting with color and with different fonts for the subtitle. Heidi suggested taking the word wild and slanting it, adding some more color.

And then some time went by. The team at Road Trip Press was pressing on with their journey. There was a developmental edit to do on the book. Then a deeper edit. Then beta readers giving their feedback. I worked on other design projects. I art directed a children's picture book I really love. I sold my novel to a favorite press. Then in February of this year, Heidi and team were ready to continue work on the cover.

The title had changed to The Fig Years. The new subtitle, now referencing Jessica's native roots, which also play a part in this book, is Sivvy, Frybead (Lack Thereof) and Me.

The team was still interested—perhaps even more than ever—in sticking close to the design of The Bell Jar. I jumped back into Illustrator to build the new title in our bell-jar-esque lettering. We mulled fonts, again, for the subtitle and author name. We experimented with using a spot foil as an added detail. Considered making the edges look distressed like an old book. And in the end, coming back to our simpler roots, we finally settled on a cover that everyone thought was best.

I'm excited to continue with this book journey and follow it all the way to its publication. I may be back on here with another blog update, because I'm lucky enough to be designing the interior as well.

Meantime, more information about Jessica Doe can be found here. And you can follow Road Trip Press's journey to The Fig Years here. And here's the very opening of the book to give you a little taste:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer my grandparents’ orchard caught fire, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember eating Fig Newtons. It’s old people food, something my grandma always had in her cupboards. I would eat whole sleeves of them. She, with her bones thin and hollow as a bird’s, dished them up alongside eggs fried in bacon grease and quivering dollops of homemade apple butter. The crab apple orchard in my grandparents’ backyard, where paradise was nothing but temptation, seemed constantly, achingly, pregnant with fruit. Mamo never called me fat and, for that kindness, sitting at her Formica table, I happily spooned my way to my first twenty years of binge-eating.

a moment in the life of my book: style guide

My publisher has sent me the copyedits for my book. It's another of the steps on the way to this thing becoming a thing. Seeing it in my inbox gives me one of those whooshes in your body that you can call excited and you can call nervous and I'm going to call excited. Along with edits to punctuation and spelling and suggestions to wording, is the copyeditor going to have found plot holes that I won't know how to solve? My book is, among other things, a mystery, after all. Every step along the way, I've worried about how easily a mystery, like any knitted blanket, can come unraveled.

But first, look. Something I've never received before. The copyeditor has done a "style guide" for my book. Wow! This is a document that informs the choices the copyeditor makes, that can guide the publisher and author as they respond to those choices, that can guide the proofreader once a book gets to that step in the process, but for me, it feels like a gift. Seeing the file name turns my knitting metaphor (I don't even know how to knit) into something bigger, turns my blanket into a flesh and blood being, and opening the style guide is like opening up the results from an Ancestry DNA panel.

And look! Here's a section of the style guide called "word and phrase list." These words and phrases are my words and phrases. I believe they're chosen because each can be spelled or presented more than one way and the copyeditor is designating just which way they will be presented on the page, but this funny assemblage of words tells a little story about my story.

aha
bull's-eye
card sharp
déjà vu

And somehow even most exciting of all, she's put together a list of "character notes." Here are the names of all my main and important secondary characters with a paragraph, each, of description. The people I created, listed out for me, as if they're real people, even with the odd names I gave them. One the Gun. Two the True Blue. Three the Goatee. 

And I don't know why, but the fact that she's put this list in chronological, instead of alphabetical, order makes my nerd heart sing.