Book cover: Purgatoire

The next Forest Avenue Press book to come after mine will be Liz Prato's novel in short stories, Purgatoire. Which is interesting because both of us had a connection to the press before we pitched our books. I'm their cover designer and Liz is their editor at large. When both Liz and I were considering who to submit books to, we both separately, unbeknownst to the other, had the realization that "my book is a Forest Avenue book." Not meaning that publisher Laura Stanfill would say yes to us since we each had a relationship with her and the press—because that was definitely not a given in either case—but that knowing the press as intimately as we did, Liz and I could tell that our books would fit well into the Forest Avenue catalogue. And both of us knew deep down that this was where we wanted our books to go.

I love that we had this same thought around the same time and that, joy of joy, Laura said yes to us both.

Here's the official description of Liz's book:

In 1910 Sabé Parella makes the journey from northern Italy to southern Colorado to join her husband who went ahead to work in the mines. But when she arrives along the banks of the Purgatoire River, he is nowhere to be found. As discrimination, extortion, and Prohibition close in on her family, the men succumb to drinking, crime, and mental illness, while the women find strength in themselves, and in each other, to survive.

Based on Prato’s immigrant ancestors, Purgatoire is a novel-in-stories spanning several decades that traces how the shame and secrecy of one man’s abandonment haunts a family for generations. Prato weaves a hopeful tale of sisterhood and the complex relationships between parents and children, expectations, reality and our true desires.

I was excited to work on this cover because I know and love Liz. I've done cover work for her before, actually, for her story collection Baby's on Fire, and the Forest Avenue anthology she edited, The Night, and the Rain, and the River. For Purgatoire, Liz mentioned that she was interested in imagery of a bridge:

My thinking is that there be a bridge over the Purgatoire River. The bridge does myriad work in terms of metaphor—a bridge between countries/across the ocean, between cultures, between Trinidad and Aguilar, between the spirit world and the human realm. And all the characters are crossing a sort of bridge in their lives—they're crossing into something else, while leaving another life behind.

I was intrigued with this—and with a packet of materials Liz put together for Laura early on in the editing process for her book. The packet told the story of the story of her book, in a sense. It detailed ways in which her true family background informed the story, and the research she did around the real and the fictional story. The packet is so cool! Full of old photographs and documents and postcards and newspaper clippings. In there was a photo of the actual Commercial Street Bridge over the Purgatoire River.

I liked the idea of trying to recreate this bridge. And in googling around to see if there was much out there, particularly an image that might be clear and detailed enough that I could try to build the bridge accurately, I found this lovely picture postcard

I loved, too, the texture and the way color worked in the postcard. It seemed like a beautiful way to show the time period in the novel without leaning too heavy into the usual visual tropes of historical fiction since Liz's book is definitely of another era but in less a historical fiction and more a lit fiction way. Not that historical fiction isn't lit, but that Purgatoire falls into a little different genre basket. As I started to build my version of the Commercial Street Bridge, I already had it in the back of my mind that it might be cool to style it like a picture postcard. Liz's packet of historical info was another reason my brain went in a postcard direction when thinking on how to frame this art—all the examples of archival information in there from when she did research for her book.

I started building the bridge by creating shapes in Illustrator.

Putting it all together and using other shapes to cut out and define space.

And then I built a landscape around the bridge using the original picture postcard as a model. The shape of the surrounding land...

Some clouds for the sky...

I liked the idea that you'd be able to see the river going under the bridge and then curving off on its way. As I worked, a color scheme happened sort of organically. I knew we might change it all as I started collaborating more with Laura and Liz, but in order to have something that would be fun to present to them, something more finished looking, I let myself follow the colors where they wanted to emerge. The colors came from a few different places, actually. First, they were a sort of more saturated version of the original picture postcard: blues and golds for water and sky. Greens in the landscape, an eggshell color for the bridge. Too, Liz had said she was drawn toward yellow, orange, gold, brown. I pictured brown lettering across a sky that started out in a wash of orangey gold and rose into blue. Finally there were the colors in the example covers she'd sent us that she liked - and these three in particular that she had selected for color.

Golds, peaches, blues. I liked the way the colors in The Antidote (super cool book, by the way) moved from a peach through gold, through green, and up to a very turquoise blue. And I liked that very soft icy blue in the sky from The World and All That It Holds. I'm sure all of these things informed the color that started to happen.

That color started out light, soft, as I started putting my scene together...

....and added a cat. This was an element that Liz really wanted for her cover. Luna is a recurring character in Purgatoire—and a special one. Not only is she a cat, she's an immortal cat! In wanting to include Luna in my artwork, I thought about putting her in the foreground with her back to us, looking out on everything.

I deepened the colors as I added a paper texture to my scene.

And then I experimented with some type treatments and sent a few samples to Laura to show the direction I was playing with.

I made samples without the cat, too, but let's face it: we weren't going to gaze out over the Purgatoire River without Luna. Laura liked what she saw and passed the samples along to Liz. Liz liked the layout of the bridge and landscape and the inclusion and position of the cat—but this cat was not yet Luna. She needed to be less fluffy, less rotund.

I also hadn't quite gotten the landscape of the area right. "I'd like to see the landscape along the river be less green-green, and more wild," she told Laura. She sent pictures that showed better what the area looked like. And she wanted more blue in the sky, which she felt would also make it feel more Colorado. She gave me thoughts on the fonts I'd played with.

The last thing Liz wondered was whether I could add a representation of a group of souls that form a Greek chorus in the book. I'd thought about this ever since I heard that that was an element in the story. What a lovely idea, a chorus of souls. But how to represent it on the cover?

I started on the easier updates. The blue for the sky, the wilder plant life, the thinner cat.

Honestly, I don't remember exactly how I got the souls to work. A bit of time has gone by between our finalizing of the front cover and my writing this, and some of that process is a blur of experimentation, me trying a lot of things and building on it as I went. I know I started by making a rudimentary human figure and then multiplying and warping it and taking those figures and overlapping them together.

Then it was experimenting with different levels of transparency, blurring, overlaying with clouds, stacking multiple layers and blending them together.

Meantime as the ghosts did their ghost thing, Luna was going through her own transformation. 

There was also more experimenting with fonts and refining of colors, but I don't want this post to be fifty pages long. In the end, we came up with a cover that I hope does honor to Purgatoire the place and Purgatoire the book.

Purgatoire will be out on April 26, 2026. More info on the book is here. More info on Liz Prato is here. And here's a taste.

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Steve Scavina

January 1935

I drive Joe’s blue Model A across the muddy Purgatoire when the sun’s about as high as it’s going to get in the winter sky. It’s not real cold for late January, but the piñons up on Fishers Peak are dotted with snow. I don’t take my eyes off the road, but you can’t miss the peak rising over Trinidad and all these damn mining towns, like it got nothing better to do.

Joe’s in the passenger seat and Perina’s in the spacious back with her cat in a basket on the seat. I’m the one driving because Joe’s blind in one eye from a fight he was in a while back. Rumor is something to do with goats, a bad price, a bad slaughter . . . no one but Joe and the guy he was in the fight with know for sure. It’s not like he’s blind as an apple, so he can go around Aguilar just fine, but he shouldn’t be doing the twenty miles to Trinidad. Especially since we’ll probably be coming back at dusk.

The reason we’re in Joe’s car instead of in my car is because my car is a rickety old Chevrolet truck. All three of us—and the cat—would’ve had to squeeze in the worn front seat, with dust and chill blowing in through the cracks. Besides, Joe would be embarrassed to be seen in it, thinking it makes him look pitiful. But the reason for our trip to Trinidad is pitiful. See, the reason I’m driving us all from Aguilar to Trinidad is because we’re going to the hospital to see Sabé.