a moment in the day: carpet

Ten o'clockish on election night. We've listened to the commentaries and obsessed over the map and eaten a pan of French fries, knowing there probably won't be any miracle in the night to bring us back from this dangerous and ludicrous place our country has gotten to. 

I've done squats and pushups and sit-ups and I should just go to bed, my brain doesn't know what to do with all of this, even though I did kind of figure it would go this way. Instead, I sit down on the floor in my office upstairs, the room where Nicholas spent most of his time at the end of his life. I lean close over the carpet. I look for pieces of fur.

That's my hair, that's my hair, that's my hair, there's one. One single strand of Nicholas's fur. It's so small. Less than an inch long. Every tiny piece of fur, I pluck it up and then twitch my fingers over a ramekin and drop it inside.

I haven't vacuumed up here since we said goodbye to Nicholas. I haven't been ready to suck up all those tiny wisps of him. I'm strange, and this little activity is undoubtedly gross. Maybe I won't tell Stephen.

I get my phone and turn on the little flashlight and direct it across the carpet. The light glints on strands. That's my hair, there's one, that's my hair, there's one. 

There's this book Powell's had on display once a long time ago, called something like Felting with Cat Hair. I don't even know if you could do that with Chihuahua hair. It's so short, could it even stick together? I don't know if I would do that if I could, even if I could procure enough fur, and I already have a little snipping of his fur in a locket, but I still hunt and hunt. I feel weird and obsessed. Maybe I won't tell Stephen.

There are lots of them embedded in the black fabric of the futon. I use the tweezers.

After what feels like a long time of this, I look and I have—almost nothing. A thin spiderweb of fur, nearly invisible against the white bottom of the ramekin.

I keep going. One little fur, one little fur. And here at the end of this important and horrifying election day, this activity feels like it's trying its damnedest to be a metaphor—this interminably slow attempt to get each of these single tiny things to add up to something big—but I'm too sad to dig too deep into what to make it mean.

a moment in the day: joy

The Halloween sky pours rain. Sitting on my porch in my unseasonable pink crepe paper flower headdress and my raincoat, I haven't had too many visitors—two Spidermen, a fairy, a tiny witch, a quilted green dinosaur. This little family is one parent down at the sidewalk and, up on my steps, a small unicorn and an older kid, maybe elevenish?, wearing a plushy light pink and purple sweater that might be part of a costume and might just be a sweater. 

The unicorn has taken her pick and is standing aside as her sibling peers down into my bowl. I have all the basics: peanut butter cups, M&Ms, Snickers, Almond Joys.

The kid in the pink and purple sweater picks up a tiny package in bright blue. "Hmm," very thoughtfully, "I've never had a Joy before." They drop it and hunt around a bit, talking as they go, finally returning to it. "There's really nothing in here that I haven't tried before. Except Joy."

a moment in the day: sky

People are sharing pictures of the northern lights, again, on Facebook. I knew there was a possibility through some news story I popped into earlier in the day. Now, late, Stephen doing dishes, I go upstairs and click over to the NOAA Aurora 30-Minute Forecast tab I've had on my computer ever since May, the first time everyone in Oregon but me, it seemed, saw them. The map shows bright red—high chance—over a huge portion of the top of the country and Canada, cooling to a lime green—still some chance—as it dips into Oregon and over Portland.

I get a funny pang in my chest. This is just one more example of the ways my life has changed now that I don't have Nicholas in it anymore. I have no reason to go outside at the end of the night.

When I go back downstairs and mention the northern lights to Stephen, he says, sure, let's go look, and he takes his stocking cap and puts it over the backyard security light to keep us in darkness. I go and stand in the center of the yard. Look north over the neighbors' roof. The sky is nothing but clouds. 

a moment in the day: walk

Late afternoon on a mild October day, Stephen and I are taking a walk. The trees we pass are green, then orange, then red, then green again. 

"Want to go see the fairy garden?" he asks.

"Sure." We turn at the corner and keep going.

Taking a walk, or like last night, actually going out to a reading event, are things I didn't do much in these, the last months of Nicholas' life, as his eyes became cloudier, his body shakier, his separation anxiety all-consuming. Feels weird whenever I'm out of the house now.

There was something sacred about giving all my time to him at the end. And now, on the other side, a walk isn't just a walk; it's also not being needed anymore.

Everything is two things right now. Everything is the thing it is and also the thing it used to be. Turning the latch on the top lock of the back door—the rigidness under my fingers, then the give and the creak-clunk as it turns—is also me taking Nicholas out in the mornings. Getting up from my desk to cross the room to turn on, or off, the air conditioner is also looking for where he is on his little pile of pillows: is he asleep, is he awake, shall I get down there on the floor and give him a cuddle? Doing exercises late at night is also holding Nicholas to my chest instead of gripping hand weights as I do fifty squats, wondering what he thinks of bobbing up and down, up and down.

My history with Nicholas lives deep in my body, in all the tiny ways my body moves every day—turning over in bed, pouring a glass of water, stepping down the back steps.

Here's the fairy garden, suddenly, and Stephen and I stop to look. It's really just a house in the neighborhood where they've planted so many different types and colors of flowers that it looks kind of magical. Stephen points to a corner of the lawn and talks about how he saw the owners do some sort of special technique to get the formerly patchy grass to grow in quick and full. I think about Nicholas walking around our backyard in the tiny shoes I got him back in July when we had so many bees buzzing in the clover.

Everything is going to be two things for a while. And that's as it should be. I ask Stephen if he ever met the people who live here and if he ever told them he calls their yard a fairy garden. We look at the pretty flowers for a little longer and then we continue on our way.

Book cover: Sunshine Girl

I have loved working on the book cover for Nancy Townsley's upcoming novel Sunshine Girl, in part because Nancy is just such a lovely human being. When she first signed with Heliotrope Books, she mentioned to me that she'd like to have me design her cover, and I was hoping, but not expecting, because I assumed Heliotrope has their own designer or designers and doesn't usually use freelancers—but Nancy asked them and they said yes! It's been very nice collaborating with them and with Nancy.

To give you an idea of the book, here's the "elevator pitch" Nancy sent me when I was just getting started:

Sunshine Girl is a work of fiction that chronicles the evolution of the newspaper industry from Nixon to Biden through the lens of a multigenerational family saga.

Eliza Pearl learns the journalism trade from her father, who leads a rural Oregon newsroom. When he develops a mysteriously debilitating condition and flees to a healing center, Eliza and her mother move to Alaska to start fresh. After college, Eliza takes a job at Juneau’s largest daily, working for her father’s former protégé, Mina Breckenridge. Together they navigate sea changes in their industry: The rise of the Internet, the proliferation of social media, politicians’ “enemies of the people” accusations, the murders of journalists across the globe, and violent bloodshed closer to home. Trying to prove herself at The Empire, Eliza becomes obsessed with a feature story about charismatic parents whose adopted daughter is a flute prodigy, a story Mina inexplicably kills. As fact gets sifted from fiction, she uncovers a decades-old secret that threatens to upend her relationship with Mina and tarnish her memories of her father. Sunshine Girl, a page-turning tale of family secrets set in a world of truth-telling, explores the art of regional journalism through the lens of an intrepid reporter who discovers more than she expects—once she starts investigating her own life.

Nancy had a piece of artwork, painted by an artist friend, based on the book, that she said she'd like to use for the cover with perhaps different lettering.

The artist is Cindy Sullivan, and you can check her art out here.

I so understood why Nancy was interested in using this lovely personal piece of artwork that her friend had so generously gifted her, but I was worried that the tone might not be right for Nancy's book from a marketing standpoint. To me, the artwork felt light, whimsical. It made me think of a 1950s comedy film in which the plucky protagonist, wanting to be just like her reporter dad, decides to go out after a big scoop of her own. I'd kind of like to see that film, but I wasn't getting the sense of the more serious aspects of Nancy's book: the family secrets, the weighty topics Eliza covers in her work, her longing to connect with her father. I asked Nancy if she'd be open to my exploring other ideas, and she was totally game—which was great, because an idea was brimming.

I thought, what if we start with a newspaper or stack of newspapers, and the book title is emblazoned across it like a big headline. Then scattered on this newspaper are photos, the two main ones being of Eliza and Martin, her father. Eliza is looking away in one direction and Martin is looking away in the other. Perhaps keeping them separate as photos, turned away from each other, would introduce the separation that Cindy's artwork creates using the big book. 

Nancy and Naomi Rosenblatt of Heliotrope liked this idea, so I started tinkering. First step was to create our Eliza and Martin. I asked Nancy for a physical description of both and I also had her Google images and send me examples of people who might look like the characters.

It’s an honor to get to create the physical presence of a book's characters—an honor and responsibility. To depict them the way the author pictures them: Eliza's wavy, red hair, her expression, thoughtful, searching; Martin's beard and pipe, his determined eyes. The whole time I was piecing them together, I was worried about getting it wrong.

I used Adobe Illustrator to start creating them using simple lines.

Eliza...

And Martin...

My stack of newspapers started out the same way, as lines.

And then the lines turning solid.

One challenge/question I had was how detailed to make the newspaper. I wasn’t sure at first: did I want to create headlines and articles with actual text? Did I want to keep it impressionistic, just shapes and planes of color? Going impressionistic (for want of a better word) seemed smart. I didn't want any newspaper text to overshadow the title, author name, and blurb. I didn’t want any bit of the newspaper to overshadow our characters. Simple shapes of color seemed smartest to delineate my story columns, and I experimented with taking text and warping it in order to create my headline text. The latter wasn't completely successful, but I left it that way as I worked on building the rest of the design.

I experimented with placing my photos on the newspaper, and I created a press badge to add, to fill the space and to help cement the notion that the book is about journalists.

Once I had all my elements, I played around, created samples, sent them off, discussed the art back and forth with Nancy and Naomi. 

We went through loads of iterations with different changes, including the shape of the fake text, the name of the newspaper, the colorway. I tried a less-slanted newspaper for a sample and, on impulse, made one where I removed the photos and badge and put Eliza, big, front and center... or front and off-center. Both Nancy and Naomi were intrigued with the big Eliza and wanted to move forward with that layout. I wondered about somehow moving the blurb and adding back the photo of Martin behind her, and then I got a note from Nancy saying she had shared some samples with our mutual friend, publisher Laura Stanfill. Laura's thought about the big Eliza version was to want to put Martin back but as an image printed in the newspaper. Nancy loved this idea.

Originally, I had floated a concept in which Eliza and Martin were both pictures printed in the newspaper. We had decided against this because we worried it would make both characters seem like news stories rather than journalists—but maybe having Martin illustrated this way alone was doable because it wouldn't change the depiction of our protagonist. I shrank and shifted the details of the top of the newspaper so that I could fit the blurb above, and then I added Martin in the space where the blurb had been.  

Nancy also suggested a serif font instead of the sans serif I had been using, so I experimented with that. 

As we zeroed in on our design, I refined and added detail. And then at the very last minute, after we thought we had our finished cover, after I'd already packaged up the Illustrator file and sent it to Naomi to prep for the printing process, a thought occurred to me, something that had brushed across my consciousness here and there but that I'd never remembered to bring up. I emailed Nancy:

Oh oh! One thing I keep forgetting to ask about - and maybe you already told me? What color eyes do Eliza and Martin have?

I had originally made Martin's eyes blue because it worked well with the color scheme, and I'd gone with green for Eliza because it looked good with the red hair. How could I have been so careful to create both characters' physicalities and then assigned them eye color solely based on what I figured would look good in the design?

I got lucky. I was right. And we had a cover.

Sunshine Girl will be out on April 22, 2025. More info on Heliotrope books is here. More info on Nancy is here. And here's an excerpt.

*

The rain had started in earnest, falling fast and cold. The thoroughfare was so clogged with shoppers that Eliza nearly tripped over a figure crouching beside a newspaper box a block up the street. The box dispensed the Oregonian for seventy-five cents on weekdays, one dollar for the Sunday edition, according to the sign. The man moved copies of a tabloid-size paper from his bag to the asphalt, single copy by single copy.

He wore his hood up, partially obscuring his face.

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Eliza said, but Martin remained on his knees, facing the street. Blond-gray curls strayed out from the sides of his hood. She stayed a minute, observing him. He placed a brown tarp on the pavement and spread it out, laying papers on top to prevent them from getting wet. Tiny rivulets of water made their way through channels in the tarp’s brittle folds.

a moment in the day: nuts

Stephen's standing at the kitchen window looking out.

"Do you see it?" he asks. "Here on the gate and then over there on the fence?"

"What?" I come over.

"The piles of walnut shells from where the squirrels have been eating them."

I've been seeing them do that a lot lately. Sitting on their ledges, brown balls of fluff with their tails in jaunty question marks, gnawing at nuts over their little piles of refuse.  They seem industrious eaters at this time of year. Are they fattening up for winter? Or am I just looking forward to fall?

Me: "I don't see them."

Stephen, annoyed: "I keep having to brush the stuff off. They're leaving it everywhere."

Me, bemused: "You know that's just what squirrels do naturally."

Stephen: "It's gross."

I sidle in closer to him and now I see them. One on the low wooden top of the gate, and two more over there on the fence that separates our yard from our neighbor's. Funny, little piles of shell, almost perfectly shaped, as if art directed by tiny squirrel hands. The way our world is shared with these small beings gives me a happy, little pang in my chest.

Me: "Cute!"

Stephen: "Fuckers."

a moment in the day: picture

I'm sitting in a vintage dress on an antique chair in the early evening sun. Crouched in front of me, Eric aims the camera and fires off shots as Stephen, assisting, holds the big reflector, angling it so that its gold surface bounces sunlight across my face.

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to be sitting here having my picture taken. 

Eric has been on a mission to photograph Portland writers and artists, treating them to long, intimate sessions behind his camera, capturing them with his magical eye. He says, "Let your neck relax. Picture yourself in an opium den."

Opium dens are, of course, not where anyone would picture me, but I'm giving myself over to everything he says this evening. I let my head loll against the back of the chair. He leans in and his camera goes ksh ksh ksh.

"Loosen your jaw," Stephen says. "You keep all your tension in your jaw."

I relax my chin, let my mouth open a bit. Something deeply ingrained says, don't open your mouth, you'll look slack-jawed and unintelligent. I don't know where to look, then remind myself I can look wherever I want. I glance to my right, I glance down, I glance to the camera. Ksh ksh ksh.

Eric pauses in his shots to check out what he's been getting and then he turns the camera backwards toward me. "Have a look at this." His enthusiasm is infectious and calming. It momentarily quiets the voices in me. I look into the viewfinder. My vision tunnels down into darkness and stops on a tiny, luminous image of me. It looks beautiful and I tell him so. 

Something deeply ingrained says, who am I to think an image of me is beautiful. 

Feels egocentric, feels like it must be a lie.

He turns the camera back around and the session continues. I settle back in the chair. Light from Stephen's reflector dances and winks.

Eric says, "Close your eyes."

I've been thinking lately about that thing you do where you look at an old picture of you from when you were younger and you think, if only I'd known how good I looked back then. If only I had appreciated it. That's a universal experience and it can happen at any age. Seventy-five, and you're looking back on your fifty-five-year-old self and saying, why didn't I appreciate it? Eighty-five and you're looking back on seventy-five. You know what would be nice? If we change that narrative: be fifty-five and make the active decision to look at and appreciate it now.

Eric says, "Open your eyes."

a moment in the day: animal hospital

Two in the morning at the emergency animal hospital is quiet. Not many people in the waiting area. There's the man with the Yorkie called Max and the woman with the cat named Halloween. And Stephen and me sitting side by side, Nicholas on my lap. The big TV screen on the wall is showing Bob Ross painting a mountain with the sound mostly off.

When we first got here during the eleven o'clock hour, it was noisier, Nicholas on my lap emitting a slow rhythm: a cry, then quiet, a cry, then quiet. He was agitated and his face was swollen and we were worried he was having an allergic reaction to something. But in the time we've been waiting here, he seems to have passed whatever reaction he was having to whatever it was. The swelling has gone down and he's not crying or agitated anymore. He curls on my lap mostly snoozing. We're at that point in the long emergency room night where you ask yourself whether you should have stayed home but you've been here long enough that it feels wrong to leave.

Max and his owner have been here since seven o'clock.

Bob Ross has been painting landscapes on the TV screen for three hours. There's a Bob Ross network, apparently? This late into the night, that fact feels kind of surreal. What is the purpose of the Bob Ross network? Is it expressly made for calming people in waiting rooms? Can individuals subscribe to the Bob Ross Network?

Time moves weirdly during the emergency room night. It feels like it moves both too fast and too slow. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint another mountain. I pet Nicholas. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint tree branches. I pet Nicholas. I stare into space. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint wave breaks in a seascape.

Now a sudden hot seep spreads across my lap under Nicholas. He's peeing. It's not a little tinkle but a wide Bob Ross seascape, and I'm too tired to really care. 

"Yeah," I say to Stephen, deadpan. "He's peeing."

As Stephen gets up to go after paper towels and call the front desk person for a clean up, I turn my eyes back to Bob Ross. It's going to be a long night.

Raising a glass to Peg

Today would have been my friend (since I was six) Peg's eightieth birthday. As a kid I always remembered it, of course, because it was the Fourth of July. This birthday is so bittersweet because she just left us all two short days ago. I'm still in that place where I don't quite believe it. When I want to honor someone, if only just for myself, whether it be for their passing or their birthday, I tend to search their name in my partially-digitized diary, looking for passages I can pull out and maybe share. or maybe just read through. Memories I've forgotten. I started doing that this morning, poking around through my computer, looking at little mentions of her, but then I ran out of time and had to get on the clock for work.

The other night, Stephen was telling me a special Peg memory of his, which he also shared on a loved one's post on Facebook today, about an evening when we had Peg over for dinner:

The three of us sat outside and had a lovely meal. When we asked her what wine she wanted to drink, she told us that she never drank wine in this country, that she only drank wine in Europe; she thought the wine you could get here was way inferior to what you could get there. So, no thank you! I got such a kick out of that; that was so HER.

I loved that little snippet of memory. And I mentioned it to my mom just now on the phone. And she told me that years ago, when she and my dad introduced Peg to Australian wine (we lived in Melbourne for a few years when I was very young), it was the same: Peg loved it so much she decided that she'd only want to drink Australian wine. 

Funny, when I got off the phone with Mom, I jumped back on my diary search, poking around my old journals and looking for Peg's name, and this came up. It's not a memory of Peg per se. It's Peg's memory of my dad. One that she shared in a long email thread I started back in 2020 after my dad died, wanting to collect stories about him. This was Peg's offering, and she told it because she was thinking about Dad, but I would like to share it, thinking about her. She said:

I have so many stories to share. My fondue story is one of them. It was the adults having fondue one evening. Everyone had left the table except Don and me. He had opened a bottle of Wynn’s Cabernet and he and I finished it off and maybe opened another. It was wonderful wine and I credit him with introducing me to its charms. He saved his last bottle of Wynn’s for my 40th birthday some years later because he remembered how much I loved it. I still have the empty bottle, even though you can hardly read the label.

Mara can tell you how I never stopped talking about that wine, to the point that she was compelled one Christmas to import a few bottles for me!

There are many more stories that show how much I loved that man. He was one of a kind and will never be forgotten.❤

I kind of love that sentence, "I credit him with introducing me to its charms." I love the whole passage because it's a memory of my dad and a memory of Peg, not to mention my lovely friend Mara, but also because it's so full of Peg's voice. Like she said about Dad, she was a one of a kind and never to be forgotten. And though I don't have any European wine or any Australian wine, and though I'm sipping on a two-hour-old peanut smoothie that's gloopy and half separated, I do raise a glass to her. A woman of class and grit and humor and a woman who knew what she liked. Like this other tiny memory I came across, from my diary back in 1985:

Of course the 2nd thing that made the day good was the Everly Brothers concert. It was really great. Let me see…what did they sing? “Bye Bye Love”, “Bird Dog”, “Kathy’s Clown”, “On the Wings of a Nightengale”, “Wake up Little Suzie”, “All I have to do is dream”, “Claudette”, “Be Bop alula”, Oh so much! And it was great! I got myself a t-shirt & a poster which is a collage of their albums & magazine covers. Peg got a copy of a tape that was a concert they did in ’83 which was very similar to ours.

We came home with the top of Dad’s convertible down and Peg’s tape blaring “Claudette”, “Bye Bye Love”, “Bird Dog” out of the speakers.

a moment in the day: sherlock

"This episode has gone off the rails," I say when we pause the show to duck into the kitchen for seconds on dinner.

As I scoop and microwave and pour, Stephen is talking about how he remembers from the first time we watched the series, back in the summer of 2020, that it starts out fun and then goes increasingly off the rails. I remember that during that first time around, I enjoyed the show overall more than he did, that I tolerated, and at times enjoyed, the over-the-topness and progressive ludicrousness way better than he had.

This particular episode is off the charts off the rails, with preposterous twists and overblown adventure sequences and a gathering cruelty in the plot that, instead of being entertaining, just makes us both feel squirmy and disturbed. I think if not for my insistence that we see the series through, and maybe the beautiful, odd charisma of Andrew Scott, Stephen would have switched to something else long ago.

We get our seconds and head back to the bedroom. Settle in. Press play again and the action continues. And when the strains of that delicious soundtrack swoop in, I could almost cry with longing. 

This second binge of Sherlock is about to be over, and I don't want it to be over. Because back in the summer of 2020, my dad was still in this world. And through all his struggles with the cancer, I was talking to him on the phone every day. Stephen and I were watching Sherlock and he and my mom were watching Elementary, the other modern Sherlock Holmes TV series. I would tell Dad he should watch Sherlock and he would tell me I should watch Elementary. And in the end, neither of us did either. We never had time to make that swap and talk about the shows the other of us knew better. 

But just the talking that we did do, about the thing the other of us hadn't yet experienced, was enough that now, four years later (can it really be four years later?), all I feel, while I'm watching Holmes and Watson do their thing, is him.

Book Cover: POST-Apocalyptic Valentine

Normally the story I tell about a book cover is about brainstorming concepts, experimenting until I find something I like, maybe trying a new technique. But for POST-Apocalyptic Valentine, the upcoming poetry collection by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and published by 7.13 Books, the cover story was something altogether different. 

We had a tight timeline, just a few weeks, but luckily the author had a photo she wanted to use and a strong idea about tone and type treatment. We met on a Zoom call to discuss. 

Linda described just why she thought the photo, which showed a lonely looking, graffitied phone booth sitting in the middle of a wide sweep of sand, would be the perfect image for her book. I jotted notes of what she said: 

junk, abandoned, writing in the sand, writing on the wall, missed connections...

It wasn't until the next day, when I sat down to play with how I might work this image into a book cover with the added elements of title and author name that I realized we had a problem. I think the reason I didn't make the connection the night before is that when I'm Zooming (or god forbid chatting with someone on the phone) half my attention is always taken up with the social aspect of the call, social anxiety, the effort of needing to appear normal in the world. Somehow I didn't make the connection between the phone booth picture and the other handful of pictures Linda had offered up as possible cover fodder, all of which were taken on the sand at the Salton Sea. One showed a giant metal cricket. One showed a curved sculpture built of toilets.

The phone booth was an art installation.

Which meant in order to use it, we needed permission from not only the photographer (Linda's husband, so: check), but also the artist.

Linda said the art installations at the Salton Sea were not signed, so we didn't know who had made this particular piece. I asked Linda to think through other images that might work for the cover, and I set to trying to track down the artist. I knew Linda had her heart set on this particular photograph, and I, too, wasn't keen on having to find something new. With only a few weeks to create a cover, we really didn't have time to come up with a whole new direction.

I got lucky. I don't really remember the words I put into Google. Public art... Salton Sea... Phone booth... I Googled at random. Phone booth on the sand. But it didn't take me long at all to track down other images of the phone booth art piece, and the name of its creator, through some recent news articles.

This sent me down a whole new rabbit hole. Iröndäd, as he's known, has been on a quest to save the Salton Sea. "Few issues need the attention of Californians more than the ecological crisis here at the Salton Sea," he says in this article on KSUI News San Diego. "Since 2018, the sea has been shrinking at a rapid rate, exposing vast playas that emit toxic dust in the air as the wind blows across them." To bring the ecological crisis to the public's attention, Iröndäd started the Salton Sea Run, in which he runs the entire shoreline (around 95 miles, taking about 30 hours), tracking his GPS coordinates as he goes, thereby recording the shrinking of the shore in a very particular way through run after run. He does this in a gas mask, keeping himself safe from those toxic fumes but also, again, bringing attention to the crisis.

Here's another article about it in The Guardian.

I was captivated by Iröndäd's quest, but more importantly for my purposes, I had found the name of the man who created the art Linda wanted to use for her book cover.

One task down of three. I'd discovered who he was. Now we had to find his contact information, and contact him in hopes of getting permission.

I Googled Iröndäd, with and without umlauts, looking for a website or social media accounts, something with contact information. Turns out there are a lot of people using Irondad as a social media name. I think it's a term having to do with running (he's completed triathlons and ultramarathons) and there's also some sort of Spiderman connection to the word. I didn't delve too deep. I was looking for a real, non-superhero man (or maybe superhero if he can save the Salton Sea).

I couldn't find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... but I did find some sort of Bombay Beach art association Facebook page, and I slipped in there, asking if anyone knew him. Wasn't hearing anything back. Time was growing ever shorter. I jumped on an email thread I had going with Linda and with publisher Leland Cheuk, to tell them I wasn't having any luck. I got halfway into that email and thought, what if we could contact the reporters or news platforms of the articles about him. I clicked into one. Would they give out contact info? That felt unlikely. Privacy issues. Scrolling through the article, feeling like I was grasping at straws with no time left, my eye caught something. Right there in the middle of the feature, plain as day, was a link to the artist's website.

I don't know why I had missed it before or why I had been unable to find his website by Googling him. But suddenly I had a website with a contact page.

Finding him didn't guarantee in any way that we'd be able to secure permission, but I took a flyer on it and while Linda reached out to him, I started working the image into a cover.

First I needed to build a little more of the photo. I needed more space around the phone booth for my text. So, I took it into Photoshop and added more sky and sand by cutting and pasting pieces of the existing photo and using the clone brush to clean it up and get rid of obvious duplication.

Then I experimented with the type treatment. Linda had said she was interested in lettering that looked like graffiti. I had a graffiti font I liked, and I played with that, manipulating the duplicate letters so that they were all different from each other. I also looked at pictures of graffiti and built some lettering based on that.

Time was going by and I wasn't hearing back about the artist, but I just kept experimenting. The photo seemed to want the lettering to be slanted, so a lot of my samples did that. The couple book covers that Linda had said she favored (I always ask an author what book covers she really likes) had some element of curved lettering so I tried doing my lettering in an arch as well. For colors I stuck mainly with sky and sand colors, sometimes using the red of the phone and the pink of the antenna heart as accents.

On impulse I also tried a different direction, thinking what if, instead of graffiti, the title and author looked like they were written out by hand. Something loose and thin that allowed more of the background picture to show through, left more air in the image.

And then I got an email from Linda: Iröndäd had said yes.

Hurrah! I kept working and finally sent some samples out to Linda and Leland. Linda loved the handwritten sample and said it looked like skywriting to her, which hadn't occurred to me. We had some back and forth about the blurb snippet and then finally, and in the nick of time, had our cover, with special thanks to Iröndäd. 

When I share these little blog posts, I, of course, hope that folks might enjoy hearing about the design process and be interested in the book, but in this case I also hope you might delve a little deeper into Iröndäd's art and his cause and what's happening out there at the Salton Sea.

POST-Apocalyptic Valentine will be out officially on September 3. More info on Linda Watanabe McFerrin is here. More info on Iröndäd and the Salton Sea Run is here. The photo of Free Love Phone Booth by Iröndäd was taken by Lowry McFerrin.

Here's one of the poems from the book for a little taste:

"POST-Apocalyptic Valentine"

My heart, my love,
FRAGILE
was on the line
HANDLE WITH CARE
when everything went haywire.
CONTENTS MAY SHIFT UNDER PRESSURE
You, a zombie now,
CONTENTS MAY SPILL UNDER PRESSURE
without a clue about me
or you—
promises all broken and
an apocalypse looming …
URGENT
URGENT
URGENT
I need to send a bullet
SPECIAL DELIVERY
into your brain.
EXPRESS MAIL
I am so sorry.
RETURN TO SENDER
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN

Book Cover: A Tree of My Own

Today, and in celebration of World Refugee Day, we're doing the cover reveal for a book that's very close to my heart. As far as writing in my blog is concerned, A Tree of My Own deserves more than just a cover reveal post, because my role went beyond cover design and beyond even interior design, although I did both. I was brought in on the project—which is a children's picture book—primarily to work with the illustrator, Kayor, and refine the visual storytelling. To do that, I took some of his early sketches, changed things around, added some sketches of my own, and storyboarded the book, giving Kayor the map that he used to turn into his beautiful illustrations. I suggested changes in story structure and even some text edits. The project was highly collaborative and it was truly wonderful to work with publisher Frances Lu Pai of Qilin Press and writer Nui Wilson as well as Kayor. 

But I'll detail some of that process in a later post. This post is for the cover.

A little about the book. The story tells about the refugee experience of the Karen people (some information on the culture is here) through the point of view of a young girl, Posada (which means youngest child in her language), who, with her small family, flees her war-torn Burma village to a refugee camp in Thailand, and then later to a new home in Portland, Oregon. 

When Posada is born in Burma, the tradition in her village is that every new child is given her own tree. In her early years, Posada goes often to the woods to visit her tree and play with its seeds. After she and her family are forced to leave, and throughout her journey across countries and cultures, Posada doesn't feel truly settled, truly at home, until she finds herself a new tree in America.

When I met author Nui Wilson at last year's Portland Writers Picnic and heard her talk about the tradition of Karen trees and how Nui was weaving that tradition into a story, I was captivated. 

And Kayor's art captivates me further. He lives and works in Thailand where he makes art primarily focused on the lives of the Karen people. His work is friendly and joyful, richly colorful, adorable without being cutesy. You can check out his Instagram page here.

For the cover, Kayor gave us a few sketches to choose from with concepts for cover art.

The detail of representing the Y in My as a seed was Nui's great idea. In discussing the cover art with Nui and publisher Frances, I suggested we go with number 5. It features Posada nicely, is joyful and exuberant, and I loved the slant suggested by her body. The open space in the art felt perfect for adding the text we needed. Frances and Nui liked it too.

When I got the finished artwork I was so happy. Look, how pretty!

For the type treatment, I started with lae-li as inspiration. Lae-li is a Karen word for goodbye. There are two places in the book where Posada has to say goodbye to her home and on each of these pages, we wanted to include that word. I worked the word up in Illustrator and dropped it onto the page in InDesign. Here's a detail of one of the two pages.

So, when it came time for me to start work on the cover text, I thought I'd see what it would look like if I built the words in the same style as my lae-li.

At the same time, I looked at some fonts including a simple one called Chalkboard and a more whimsical one I love called Little Pearl. Using all three typefaces, I experimented with space in the artwork to see what would fit the best. Also, we wanted to include one other element: the Karen translation of the title, not a transliteration like with lae-li, but an actual translation in letters too, which Nui got for me:

The challenge of the cover was color. The cover art has muted colors, a lot of browns, which at first I thought was a good thing, an opportunity to use the lettering to add color and pop. And, I mean, it was—but it was also a challenge because a lot of colors ended up tending to recede against the mid-range shades of the art. Reds, bright greens, blues, purples were too dark; oranges, light greens, pinks were too quiet. Greens in particular would fit nicely with the illustration, but I couldn't find a shade that stood out enough—and I really wanted to get some color in there that was on the red-pink-orange side, to add some of that particular brightness. But really the only colors that stood out well enough against the muted browns were white and yellow.

I did some wild, random, mostly unsuccessful experimentation:

Do you notice one thing? In all my early doodling, I forgot Nui's seed letter Y.

But I did like the effect I got when I played around with adding this blurred fuchsia on top and green on the bottom of the title. It gave me that bit of warm, on-the-red-side color and that bit of green that I wanted, while letting the yellow do its job in helping the title stand out.

Frances and Nui liked this too, so I played around with different layouts, experimenting with whites and yellows, changing the fuchsia out with a red that more matched the colorway of the cover art, and particularly the colors in Posada's dress pattern. 

You might notice, too, that all of our names went on the cover. Frances had said mine should be there, and I, in turn, said hers should. With a project as collaborative as this one, it felt right.

In the end, we all agreed on the color and layout we liked best, and then Nui asked if I'd switch the font for one she liked better from a different sample—and we had our cover. With just one last update to make: I wanted Posada's seed to stand out better in its brown against brown, so I took the cover into Photoshop and did a tiny tweak to that seed so that it would pop a little more.

It's been so lovely seeing Posada come to life, and I can't wait for you to meet her too. A Tree of My Own will be out this fall through Qilin Press. Qilin Press is a nonprofit so all the proceeds from the book will go to providing educational and training opportunities for people in the Karen community, particularly those who are still living in refugee camps. More info on the book and on Qilin Press is here. More info on Kayor's art is here. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that Frances Lu Pai is also the publisher of Demagogue Press, whose focus is primarily on cool games, and you can check that out here. More information on World Refugee Day is here.

a moment in the day: gravy

The kitchen cutting board is stained green from chopped basil and scattered with the thin shavings of garlic skin. It's the night of the official publication day of David Ciminello's The Queen of Steeplechase Park, a book whose cover I designed and whose story I've known and loved for years, and to celebrate, I am cooking "Big Betty LoMonico's Tomato Gravy" from the recipe on page 15.

My phone is playing some 1930s music. I like to go overboard on things like this. The recipe, like all the recipes in the book, contains some tongue-in-cheek instructions you're not meant to follow. But when it came time to "Place canned tomatoes in a large bowl and use your hands to squash them until smashed real good. Preferably while singing 'My Blue Heaven,'" I momentarily stopped the music and jumped on Youtube to find the song and sing along, at least with the words I knew.

But right now, it's time to "Put olive oil in a big pot." I take a moment to think on the next instruction in the recipe. Do I or don't I? 

I put down the olive oil and grab my phone. A quick text to David:

Bella advocates for swigging from the olive oil. I like going all the way on these things. Is she being truthful or facetious?

Olive oil isn't bad.

a moment in the day: delizioso

The three little squares on my computer screen are Laura, David, and me, having a Zoom meeting to discuss the details of our book launch event at downtown Powell's on Wednesday in celebration of David's novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park. We've been trading potential questions to ask each other and chatting over the pieces he plans to read, brainstorming the best structure for the event—and I have to say, listening to Laura organize this whole thing is like taking a masterclass in how to be a good publisher. How to arrange everything to a T, how to make her author feel taken care of. 

Speaking of taken, now David says he needs to check on his cooking, and Laura and I are taken with him on a ride through his house: that funny Zoom view of a stationary figure with rooms slipping by behind. The kitchen is dark. He sets us on a table or a counter, and now all I see in David's square is a shadowy hump of head and back as he bends into the oven. Laura's square is full of grins. David's making chicken parmesan, in honor of Bella, the Italian chef and burlesque queen at the heart of his book. Food is the perfect way to celebrate Bella, and I have my own plan to celebrate by trying my hand at making "Big Betty LoMonico's Tomato Gravy" from the recipe on page 15.

David straightens from the oven.

I call out, "We want to see it!"

And so he opens the oven back up and presents it to the screen, all steam and bubbling cheese.

He puts the pan back in the oven, gives a few scant instructions to his husband who's somewhere just off screen, and then he's slipstreaming us back through the house and stationing us where we were before.

He thanks us for letting him make his kitchen interruption.

Laura laughs. "See? That's why small presses are the best. Penguin Random House wouldn't get to go into the kitchen with you to check on your chicken parm."

Book Cover: Like Every Form of Love

Designing the book cover for the re-release by 7.13 Books of Padma Viswanathan's memoir Like Every Form of Love presented me with an interesting challenge. Which is the kind of design job I really enjoy. Working with 7.13 editor Hasanthika Sirisena, I was given some graphic directions that author Padma liked and then asked to give them a particular twist.

Padma said she loved art nouveau, botanical illustrations, vintage aesthetics, the art of Ludwig Bemelmans. She loved art that strayed outside the lines. For colors she favored mustard, orange, chartreuse, rose.

I should stop and say that when she mentioned art nouveau I got excited. I thought it would be a lot of fun to create an elaborate and ornate nouveau design. But the more we talked about it, the more I thought that wasn't the direction for this design. Art nouveau had a good chance of making the viewer think the book takes place in a very different time period. Instead, I started looking at the very evocative floral textiles she shared.

I should stop, too, and share the original cover of this book. It has been published in Canada by Penguin Random House, and 7.13 Books is handling its American release. Here's the Canadian cover.

You can see the subtitle there: a memoir of friendship and true crime. In that original cover, the shattering of the rose symbolizes the fate of that friendship. Here's the description of the book:

From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.

Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.

Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip's life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.

In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.

I asked Padma what the title phrase, Like Every Form of Love, referred to and whether it occurred in the book, and she had this to say:

"Yes, the line is 'Friendship, like every form of love, points ineluctably to the future.' It is from a book of philosophy, called Friendship, by Alexander Nehamas. Elsewhere, I say, 'In fact, pace Nehamas, friendship is like every form of love, complicated in its own particular ways.'" 

I loved that and noodled on it as I started building a floral textile of my own based on the examples Padma had given me.

Like in the Canadian cover, we wanted something that would take the floral design I was building and give it a twist that could show the shadow side of friendship, the tension that threatens every form of love. I wondered what aspects of the crime portion of the book might be pulled out and referenced on the cover, so I checked in with Padma and Hasie about what those specifics are. Padma had this to say:

"There is a murder by shooting in the story (which remains unsolved), a lot of discussion of confinement (Del was imprisoned for a robbery but it's not clear what kind of freedom she enjoyed on the outside, as a working-class Canadian woman in the 1950s). The 'shadow' is another dark motif, as a metaphor for the writer's shady side, which I also explore."

I played with turning my floral design into a negative and perhaps in that negative realm the leaves of my flowers could be matched with the similar shapes of bullets.

Hasie and Padma didn't like the bullets in there, and the negative/positive color scheme thing, interesting in concept, didn't work well visually. Hasie suggested trying to render the floral design into a mask or a genderless face. Padma advocated for creating the design to suggest an explosion. Hasie liked that idea and told me to go for it. 

The explosion angle was super interesting and quite a challenge. How to take my flat arrangement of flowers and turn them into something dimensional and fluid like an explosion?

I tried...

and tried...

and tried...

Everything looked like it was shattering or dripping. 

Finally after a bunch of tinkering I found something that very much did evoke the idea of an explosion. I worked it into a layout that I was happy with and passed it along to Hasie and Padma for a look.

It felt quite dynamic and did get across what we were hoping for it to get across. But it had a comic-book-y feel that Hasie didn't think was right. Try as I might, I couldn't find a way to turn the floral textile into an explosion without having to invoke the two-dimensional tropes that pushed it over the edge into something cartoony. I wondered about taking it in a new direction and when I checked in with my idea, Padma said:

"From everything you've said here, it seems to me the most straightforward fix is to take the current idea and, as you say, slant it toward either shattering or tearing/fraying. I suspect where it's getting hung, conceptually, at present, is between the idea of a gun (explosion) and a friendship ending (shattering / tearing / fraying). I think the latter idea is more central and organic to the book, so why don't we try that?"

I did play around with the shattering idea, but I was more drawn to tearing/fraying. It would work more (to use Padma's word) organically with the floral fabric design, and when I thought of the tension that threatens every form of love, and particularly friendship, I figured it most often unravels rather than flying apart.

As I worked on the layout for the new direction, I discovered something great. (Discovery is as much a part of the process in designing a book cover as creativity is, at least in my experience.) I liked the idea that part of the fabric would be ripped to the point of nearly tearing away from the larger, frayed whole. My first impulse was to tear the word love in half. When I did that, I found that two words from the subtitle pulled away with the disembodied VE: friendship and crime. I loved that. What a great coupling of words to make sit together all by themselves.

Once I created the layout and Hasie and Padma were happy with it, I had to make it go from looking like a design to looking like frayed fabric.

Step one was to give it a fabric texture. I did this by finding a fabric I liked with no pattern and an easily discernible weave and marrying it to my design in Photoshop. I don't want to bore you by getting technical but the simplified version is that you open the main graphic, then click Place Embedded and place the fabric image within the file. Then in the Layers panel you set the blending mode to Overlay. And make adjustments from there.

Blogger isn't the best place to try to see the detail on this.

Step two was to add frayed threads all around. For this, I went back into Illustrator and drew the threads one by one. Yeah. Time-consuming. Here it is in progress.

I had been thinking of the text floating on top of the fabric, but Padma wondered if I could embroider it. Or, she was thinking about me maybe finding a font that looked embroidery-ish rather than just flat. I did find a font that did that, but I figured if I was going to go the sewn-lettering route, I should go all the way and create it myself.

Step zero: the font.

Step one: I recreated the lettering on top of that font using vector lines in Illustrator. Each line had a gradient applied to it so that it was lighter in the center and darker on the edges to give each "thread" dimension. There were three different colors of threads. I made sure to leave gaps here and there and threads connecting the letters.

Step two: I removed the font and saved this with a transparent background (the green is just for your viewing) and brought it into Photoshop. There, I created three layers of the same lettering with three different levels of brightness. Then I did some erasing until my lettering was dimensional.

Step three: I did some painting and erasing to create a shadow under the edges.

Step four: I added a texture, much like I did with the fabric.

In this blog, the above probably look like incremental changes or even, between some, no change at all. I lose a lot of resolution on the images I post in here. But I dropped the updated lettering into the Illustrator file, popped back to Photoshop to add some wrinkles and shadows to my fabric, and  in the end, when we finally had our cover, author Padma was so pleased she sent me the most lovely note.

It's stunning: eye-catching, original, evocative, luscious. All the little details with the threads pulling out!?!? The textures and wrinkles! It's my favorite kind of metaphor: it has obvious surface appeal and increasing rewards each time you revisit. 

I can't believe how lucky I am.

Which I share not to pat myself on the back, but to mention how beautiful to me those last few words are. "...how lucky I am." For some reason that comment just stuck with me, how special it is to hear someone say that about something you've made for them. Because it's one thing, a fantastic thing, to be told something you've made is good. It's so much more to be told that it has made someone else feel lucky.

Like Every Form of Love's American edition will be out soon. More information on Padma Viswanathan is here. More information on publisher 7.13 Books is here. Here's a taste.

*

Phillip was buff, with hollow cheeks and expressive blue eyes: flinty or inquisitive or fonts of loving kindness by turns. There was nothing femmy or camp about him, yet he affected a performative masculinity in public, brusquely calling security guards and checkout clerks “man” and “bud.” In private, he unloosed throaty, symphonic laughs, blasts from a rogue angel’s trumpet. (God, I loved his laugh.) He’d locked that hard body around a tender heart.

His defences dropped quickly; after that trip to the city, he pursued my friendship. My other project in this time, though, was a three-day fast (either confronting or avoiding my then-life’s most urgent subject, my disastrous marriage—I’m still not sure). And as my mother had told me, a food fast is traditionally done with a social fast. She used a Sanskrit word for it, maunam, silence.

Phillip didn’t believe in it, not like the fast conflicted with his beliefs, but like he couldn’t absorb the fact of its existence. He wanted me to come thrifting with him; he wanted me to taste a delicious cookie he’d bought. I caved on all counts. I had only a few days left in Genoa Bay, and was charmed and intrigued. He was so different from my other friends. His courtly manners, opening doors for me and making me walk on the side of the street away from the curb; the way he spoke, in a thick BC lilt, his speech peppered with “fuck” the way others use “like” or “um,” using colourful, unfamiliar idioms I’d repeat to myself and write down later. I heard the stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes in his waxings-on about his main topic, the pursuit of rough sex, “the game, the gay game,” as he put it.

After his haircut in Victoria on our first time out together, he ran a hand along his new fade and mused, “Maybe I’ll find me a long-haired motorcycle dude, with my soldier’s buzz cut.”

He told me he hadn’t been sure how I would “take the whole homosexuality thing, being straight . . .”

“And Indian?” I guessed.

“Well, yeah,” he admitted, “of the culture. But I used to work at a pulp mill, and all the guys there”—Sikhs, I supposed, since they’d been stalwarts in BC’s lumber industry for generations—“they’d be having sex with women, men, everyone. I’d get to know these guys and get to know their dads and go to bed with them.”

Stories: he had a million of ’em.