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.