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."