Book Cover: Animal Kingdom

I've been so busy with design and other projects lately, to the point that I knew I couldn't take on anything new for a while. So when Alex Behr came up to me at a lit event and asked if I was too busy to design the cover for her upcoming story collection, I said, "Yes. But I will anyway!"

I love Alex as a person and as a writer. Her first story collection Planet Grim is a knockout, and I was honored to design the cover for that one. I couldn't pass up the chance to design the cover for Animal Kingdom too. 

As a treat—well, really as a help for my concepting, so that I could get a feel for the book—Alex sent me the manuscript. I'm generally too busy to read, basically, but I popped around the manuscript a bit and I can report that this one's going to be a knockout too.

Alex was interested in using a photograph as the base for the cover, as we did before, and publisher Leland Cheuk was good with that direction. Alex shared a collection of pictures for me to play with. There were so many great images to choose from. 

"The photos of me are too similar to Planet Grim, I think!" she said. 

But look at these! 

I loved the shots themselves, but they also had nice, big spaces that would be perfect for fitting in book cover text. And I had sort of the opposite take from Alex's worry that these would be too similar to our Planet Grim cover:

Planet Grim and Animal Kingdom are both short story collections, both put out by the awesome indie press 7.13 Books. In my head they were sister books and having one cover hearken back to the other felt like it might be appropriate. I particularly liked the photo where the hat obscures Alex's face. If she was interested, we could have an obscured face at the bottom of the cover of Animal Kingdom and an obscured face at the top of the cover of Planet Grim, and that would make for a nice pair.

Something that would distinguish the two nicely, if we went this route, would be Alex's guidance on tone and typesetting:

"I like the idea of album art as inspiration, where someone stoned can study the image. And it’s really clear to read. A sturdy font to contrast w/ Planet Grim."

She sent me some links to specific album covers she was thinking about.

Often big, grungy or high-contrast images. Sans serif fonts. All-caps or no-caps as opposed to title case. And often with text that's almost an afterthought but with fonts commanding enough that the eye finds them quickly. 

I started to play with various images from Alex's collection. With her go-ahead, I included the photos of her in with my experimenting. They fit really well into the album cover vibe. I played with color much like I did with Planet Grim, giving it an overall wash and contrasting that with font colors. But whereas with Planet Grim, the image becomes secondary to the overlay of text, here the large image and small text have equal weight.

Another image I experimented with was this one.

I loved it so much! The color, the blood, the fact that it seems to say there are stories in here.

This photo was one of the images I played with that decidedly did not want the album cover treatment. I don't know how I tend to know what an image wants, but I knew this one wanted balance and coverage. It wanted more text within the space of the art. It definitely wanted me to take that blood and use it in some secondary text. 

I used high-contrast color for the text, which did feel like it was staying inside that album-cover vibe. And I tried two type treatments before sending a batch of samples off for review. My favorite of the blood-heel mock-ups was on the left, but I wanted to try text that stayed nestled inside the legs as well.

There were more images I played with in the course of my cover tinkering, but in the end, Alex and Leland both liked the bloody heel. With thanks to photographer Heather Maxwell Hall, and with one tiny adjustment to add a little shadow on the left leg under the title for better visibility, we had our cover.

Animal Kingdom will be out on November 3. More info on the book and the other wonderful offerings from 7.13 Books can be found here.

A quick bio of the photographer:

Heather Maxwell Hall is a writer and photographer currently based on Vancouver Island. She's interested in synchronicity, overlooked details, and the strange magic of everyday life.

You can check out more of Heather Maxwell Hall's photographs on her Instagram page here. 

More information on Alex is here. Below is an excerpt, from "Spectacles," a story in poems. 

Alex told me she originally wrote it in the Portland literary event / workshop SHARE, which was a periodic gathering curated by Kathleen Lane and Margaret Malone, where artists of all kinds would create around a single word prompt. She says, "The word was 'spectacle' and I wrote four, drew tarot cards for them, and made my own simple tarot cards with those events written on the back." 

"I wrote a bunch more," Alex says, "during a chapbook class with Matthew Dickman at the Attic—we went to IPRC to make 12 or so copies to share among classmates. 2017." In fact, here is a pic of the chapbook! Artwork by Christine Shields.

And here's a taste of "Spectacles" from Animal Kingdom.

*

—Of the child saying to his mom, “Can you wash my tooth off? It’s bouncing around my lunchbox. I was eating Chex Mix from Hunter and it’s kind of dirty.”

—Of a camper on a Girl Scout cot. Down one leg: pink, puckered skin. The girl and her friends were in a pit. Someone squirted lighter fluid and dropped a match.

—Of tumors cracking open the wife’s bones. The wife, high on fentanyl, talks to chipmunks no one else sees.

—Of the boyfriend, drunk at the party. Dickies on the stereo. He wants to stay on the bathroom tile floor because it’s cool on his cheek. But a girl wants to pee. The boyfriend refuses to leave, so guys drag him out and punch him. At home, the boyfriend throws up blood in the tub. The rock girl documents the evening on a paper bag.

—Of Tommy, the troublemaker. In sixth-grade health class he passes around a Penthouse, but the brain is through reading garbage like that!

—Of the husband throwing a Converse sneaker against the son’s wall, and yelling: “I was trying. The divorce is on you.” The wife sneaks on the husband’s phone, seeing photos of a dark bedroom, of trees bending in silhouette, sent as texts to the woman he loves. Better Call Saul makes her cry.

—Of the middle-school girl rating list. Katie gets A+ in all categories. The brain is not on it.

—Of a young woman greeting the rock girl at a party. She sticks her finger in the hole at the crotch of the rock girl’s jeans. The hole isn’t a temptation—it’s laziness. It’s an anticorporate gesture to the corporations that don’t want her. The finger doesn’t want the rock girl, either. The hosts’ secret cameras record bad behavior. But not this.

Colin and the 9-11 Reading

I've been doing what I do when I lose someone I love: putting their name in the search in the folder of my journals (which I've been writing digitally since, I don't know, the turn of the century) and seeing what I come up with about them. I found an entry I'd written on September 12, 2009. The day after a reading that Tom Spanbauer had put together (I believe) in remembrance of 9-11. 

By then, I had been a member of Tom's Dangerous Writers class for four years. I'm not sure how long Colin Farstad had been a member, less than I. I think this may have been Colin's first public reading of his work (alongside Tom and Dangerous Writers Kevin Meyer and Elizabeth Taylor). It was at Powell's on Hawthorne, which was a big deal for a new writer, and all four had written original essays, about 9-11, for the event.

Here are a few chunks from my journal, chronicling the event (and for context, I had read at a different reading recently, and I reference it in my comments).

First in the journal there was a section I'd headed: Random quick blips from yesterday. In no certain order.

Last night after the reading when Tom told me that the way he was able to keep himself from crying, reading his piece, was looking at the old man in the front row and pretending that man was his father and he was going to laugh at him for crying. I said, “Wow, that’s so,” and paused just a moment, “twisted.” His smile went from big to bigger, and I told him the emotions he showed just made the reading that much better for us.

 

Colin at the podium. That spread of books on the shelves behind him. Big Colin smile. He’s been so excited about this and saying things like, every time I go over the railroad tracks, or see 11:11 on the clock, or, or, or – I have to close my eyes and make a wish. Afraid it wouldn’t happen after all. But it did.

 

Before the reading, telling Colin how he’d told me, before my reading, his way of being nervous earlier in the day before his performances (Closureyes) but then, getting up to show time, coming to a calm. Telling him how that helped me not be nervous for my reading and hoping the reminder would be good for him too.

That last segment is a little hard to follow. What I was saying is that when I had been nervous about reading my own work in an earlier event, Colin had told me that when he performed with his band Closureyes, he always got nervous early in the day but by the time he went on, the nerves would be gone. That comment had helped me feel less nervous about getting up to read, and so I hoped that telling him so, before his own reading, would help him not be nervous too.

OK, so here's another chunk, later in the journal entry, when I had stopped jotting random moments and was writing out the event as it had unfolded:

Colin [read] third. He probably read slower than he usually reads in class – yes, I think he did. But he was a bit fast and he has that way of mushing his words together. Made some lines hard to catch. Me, I kind of like that he read like he reads, that Colin way, but it’s too bad that you missed things. Like the cool way he dissected and inverted the god is in the details thing.

Some bits of his piece: Kissing without kissing. Letting the girl smoke in the apartment. Taking comfort in the human touch (that was said twice, I think, and was the last line of the piece). The story I tell over drinks and cigarettes. Shoulder to shoulder, cavemen around the campfire. Knee to knee on the couch (with his roommates watching the TV).

Colin got to introduce Tom. Well, not introduce, but call him up. Tom spoke as he always does. That soft blue powder voice, the hesitations and the places where that voice stumbles – all of it charming.

I wish I had Colin's 9-11 essay to read again now. To get the context for the lines I pulled out, the kissing without kissing, the cavemen around the campfire. To remind myself what I meant when I said that Colin "dissected and inverted the god-is-in-the-details thing." (Hyphens added because I've learned some about punctuation since 2009.) Mostly, though, I'm just happy that I thought to write down some of the moments of an event in Colin's life that obviously meant a lot to him. And happy to have been there in the audience for it.

And happy that I've always had that impulse to snap pictures even when I've never had the aptitude for it. 

The readers preparing before the start of the event.

Colin receiving his applause.

a moment in the day: race

I take a break from working on designing a book cover to go downstairs and do some dishes.

Go into the bathroom, where I've been doing dishes during the kitchen renovation, slink back the shower curtain to find the plates, spoons, and glasses soaking in an old cat box. Before I get to work, I pull out an ear bud and stick it in my ear. Audio is kind of the only way I have time to read books these days because when I'm not at the day job, it's book cover, book cover, book cover. Moving fonts around, building things from pixels.

Sometimes I listen to podcasts, and that's what I listen to now as I soap up bowls and run them under the shower faucet. 

The podcast is about a guy building a startup with no human employees at all, only AI "agents."

I listen to him in a Zoom meeting talking with his "employees." He asks them what they did on their weekend. Between segments, music plays, and I wonder if the song was written by AI, performed by AI, sung by AI.

How many years do I have left of designing book covers, this thing I love to do, before AI is doing it all, before my clients are all gone? Ten? Five? Two?

I leave the dishes in another cat box to dry and go back upstairs again. This is why I take every design job I can get my hands on, work all the time, read my books through my ears. Well, it's also a good thing to make money when you're renovating a kitchen and you don't feel too confident about that day job (looming recession, struggling industry, AI, AI, AI), but also:

"I'm racing against the clock." 

It pops out of my mouth as I get to the top of the steps. And it's melodramatic but it's also true. I'm racing against the clock to do this as much as I have the privilege to do this, before it's too late.

I sit back down at my computer. On the screen, built out of pixels, is an image of a clock.

Book covers: 7.13 Second Editions

Recently I had an interesting project. 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses, decided to reissue four of their earlier releases. The books had come out in 2020 but then had been "orphaned," as publisher Leland Cheuk put it, when the distributor Small Press Distribution went out of business. Here's an article about that closing from LitHub.

The books are Misery Boy by Rose Servis, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox, Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt, and Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick. I designed Beth's original cover, and other designers created the other covers.

The challenge here was to come up with a cohesive look for the series and to then honor the original designs while I created something new for each.

Leland was interested in something similar to classic Europa Editions...

or New York Review of books...

So first I played with what that basic layout would be. I liked the way frames are used in both the Europa and NYRB series. With NYRB, the frame contains all the relevant text; for Europa, it's an elegant white frame bordering the whole. Musing on the four original 7.13 books, I was inspired by looking at the Misery Boy cover, with the thought of creating a frame for the artwork that the artwork could then breach. Like the smoke coming up from The Thinker. Something like [cobbling it together quickly using the original artwork] this:

With a logo stamp for the Second Editions using the 7.13 Books logo. And all text staying outside the frame.

Or, no, what if the artwork were even more contained, like this:

I liked the idea of a chunky font and frame in black against a cream colored background, with a lot of (cream-colored) white space. But I also experimented with a white frame and text against a colored background. I sent Leland a very simplified example of what I was thinking.

He liked black on cream best too so I moved forward with that. My idea was that I would take some element from each original cover to use in the new one, to honor that original artwork. The Thinker from Misery Boy and the Golden Gate Bridge from Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society lent themselves to my design well, so I started with them. 

I built myself a new Thinker

And a new bridge.

That took a while.

Coincidentally, I had already built the Golden Gate Bridge when I was experimenting with the original cover of Edie on the Green Screen...

...before Beth asked if we could pivot to a different San Francisco landmark for her cover because she had already had the Golden Gate Bridge on one of her other books (it's a popular bridge). But that version of the bridge, with its different angle, didn't work well with my frame. There wasn't enough of it to break out of the frame. So I built a new one.

For creating my scene for the new cover of Edie on the Green Screen, I decided to scrap the landmarks in favor of Edie's profession. From the publisher description of the book:

In late '90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city's alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn't changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium's end are long gone... 

I decided to put Edie behind the bar, with the bartop being the element that breaches the frame. I pictured her as being very over it, and built both a silhouette version, as on the original cover, and a non-silhouette version, using the description of the character from the book. Dirty blond chin-length hair, tee-shirt and jeans.

Leland and Beth preferred the silhouette version, so that's what we went with. Green screen intact.

For the longest time I didn't know what to do about Each of Us Killers. How to pull out a central image from the conglomeration on the original cover, each of which felt like it wanted to be there? The cool thing about this original cover is that the grouping of seemingly random figures paired with the title says more than the sum of its parts. 

Then I thought, maybe I could do a variation on my original idea in which I have not one but a handful of frames. And each figure sits inside a frame.  

I built a yoga woman.

An auto-wallah.

A man at a computer.

A woman working in a field.

When Leland liked what he saw and sent the samples to the authors, Jenny requested that we remove the field worker in favor of the bartender. I had originally avoided that figure because I had a bartender in the new Edie on the Green Screen cover. But I knew that wasn't as important as it was in my head, so I got a new figure and some new bottles going based on the ones in the Each of Us Killers originals.

In the end, we had four new covers that hearken back to their originals, and a set that works together.

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

All four reissues are available for preorder now. You can find them on Bookshop here:

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

They will officially be out on July 13. More information on 7.13 Books, a wonderful press "by authors, for authors," is here.

a moment in the day: aunt

The place is a dive. Pool table, video poker units, beer advertisements on the walls. I take the end stool at the bar and wait for the bartender who looks to be the only employee running the show. I'm here to order food to go because after a long day of working on the kitchen remodel, Stephen googled where you could get hotdogs in the neighborhood.

Swiveling to get a look at the digs, I flash on the way it works in the movies when a woman bellies up to a bar. Some man catches her eye. Soon enough, he's coming up and starting the quippy pickup conversation. 

I order the food from the bartender and she tells me it could be a while because they only have one air fryer. I pay the check. The place is two thin rooms divided by a center wall with an open doorway on each end and a glassless window in the middle. Half full, a few folks at tables, a couple playing pool. If I look long down my side of the bar, there are the video poker and some arcade games bunched together, no one down there, and for a moment I consider going and seeing if they have like an old-school pinball game to play. But I can see through the glassless window lined with multicolored Christmas lights, across at the far corner of the room, that a band is getting ready to play.

All four of the guys have white hair. The lead guitar walks with a cane until he steps up on the tiny raised platform and gets in position. He wears a black button-up shirt with flashing gold curlicues on the arms. 

The band rocks. The music is sixties-style blues-rock with electric piano and harmonica riffs. The bartender bops happy at the air fryer. I wish I could tell my aunt Kathy about this place. She would love the vibe, the music, the whole thing. 

Up near the ceiling in one corner of the room, so the bartender can see it, is a monitor divided into four, showing the output from security cameras: the video poker area, the sidewalk tables, the parking lot, and an alley with a gray wall bare except for where someone has drawn a small red heart.

Now a young guy wearing a backwards baseball cap comes up to me to ask where the bartender went. 

His eyes linger. He says, "You know, you look so much like my aunt. I hope that's not creepy."

For some reason to reassure him that it's not creepy, I start to ask him her name, and at the same time he says, "Her name's Linda. You could be her sister."

He moves off. In from the outside door comes a small woman in leggings and a flowered top with a differently flowered backpack. She beelines past me, down the room, slipping the backpack off as she goes, to a video poker machine directly at the back of the house, immediately starts playing.

The band sings, "Don't let that greenback fool you."

I wonder if she's someone's aunt. I listen to the music and pretend to project this scene through the veil to the great beyond. "Kathy," I think toward her memory, "don't you just love this? Listen to these guys!"

The video poker squares spin and stop. Spin and stop.

I realize I was wrong about greenback. The lead guitarist with the flashing gold curlicues sings, "Don't let that green grass fool you. Don't let it change your mind. It's always greener on the other side."

My nephew comes back to the bar, "hi, aunt Linda," as he goes past.

The bartender, rocking to the music, hands me three to-go boxes and tells me there's ketchup and ranch dressing inside, and Kathy would be all over that ranch dressing, and as I put the boxes in my tote, the video lottery woman leaves her station, comes back down the aisle, and goes out the door just ahead of me.

We walk home together, me on one side of the street, she on the other, just ahead. The sky is that deep, heavy blue of nightfall. At a neighborhood intersection, she cuts across the lawn of a church to a couple of tents set up there, and I turn the corner toward home.

a moment in the day: happy

Sunday morning in our dismantled kitchen, and our friend Brad is due any minute. He and Stephen are going to be patching this skeleton of wood with drywall. Quick I go upstairs and look through my pens. Grab a pink one. I take it downstairs and, alone in the kitchen, I go over to the crisscross of bare wood that frames the space where the walls used to be. I lean in over the space where the sink used to be and draw a tiny happy face on the wood. Two dot eyes and a curve of mouth, size of a ladybug. 

I go to another spot and get close in, put a happy face on the rough side of a two by four. Cross the room, another happy face. Dot, dot, mouth.

On one length of wood, I write, horizontal,

Hi

Hi

Hi

I wonder if Stephen or Brad will see it. Or if they'll (more likely) cover it up unnoticed. I make sure to hit all four sides of the room.

Dot, dot, mouth. Dot, dot, mouth. Little bits of positivity planted in our walls.

H

A

P

P

Y

K

I

T

C

H

E

N

a moment in the day: worm

We're cleaning up after the electricians have finished working in the kitchen. I've just put a big piece of, I don't know, drywall?, in the outside garbage, and as I head back from the bin through the soft rain, Stephen is heading over with a full trash bag to chuck. 

On the wet concrete not far from my shoes is a worm. At first it just looks like a thin streak of shadow, but it's moving. Making a mosey toward the house. I don't want it to get stepped on. I stoop, make the fingers of both my hands as delicate as I can to pick it up. 

It shrinks at my touch. As I gather it in my hand, Nicholas's spirit runs from the worm and into my skin.  

I don't believe in magical things, in spiritual things, as a rule. Still. At night in bed when my defenses are down, when my daily projects are quiet and I'm missing people and worrying about people, I close my eyes, squish my head into my pillow, and try to send a ghost thread of me out into the air, into the atoms, through the wood of my house, the drywall and dust, into the night, into the all of the everything, try to send it out far enough to make a connection with someone on the other side. 

And fall asleep.

I guess I can't complain that I'm such a good sleeper.

The worm squiggles in my hand. I go over to the grass, crouch down, and let it go.