Back when I learned that Forest Avenue Press had acquired a novel about a selkie, I had a quick vision of designing a cover that would depict that mythical creature. But Julie Salmon Kelleher's The Sea-Glass Shore isn't a straight-up fantasy. It's a literary novel with a hint of otherworld. Sure, Rona is a selkie. But the book is really about family, about identity, about the longings we all have for the life we leave behind when we make big choices.
Here's from the current description from the publisher:
When Jack, librarian and curator of legends, meets Rona, she puts aside her sealskin to live as his human wife. Jack knows all selkie stories end the same: the seal-woman always finds her stolen skin and leaves. But he hasn’t stolen Rona’s skin, and they both believe their relationship is different. He doesn’t need to be that guy. She doesn’t need to run. But as their children grow into troubled teens, Jack and Rona begin falling into roles they’ve sworn to put aside.
Most selkie stories are about the beginning or the end, but this one is about the middle. How do you live with a family past of people disappearing into the sea? How do you avoid the same wrong act everyone has committed before you? And what is love—for a child, a spouse, a mortal world—in the face of history?
Every author who signs with Forest Avenue Press gets an Author Questionnaire to fill out, and one of the questions on the survey is, Would you like to make any suggestions or special requests about the book to the editors, designers, or salespeople? An idea that Julie suggested for this designer was to explore the visual theme of a small figure in a big landscape.
The landscape where the story takes place is coastal Washington, and Julie based Rona's cove on two specific spots:
Teddy Bear Cove
And Larrabee State Park
I started looking at pictures online of families standing on the shore. I had an image in my head of the four figures—Rona, her husband Jack, and their two kids—maybe in silhouette, their backs to the viewer. They'd be close together, enjoying the waterside in a huddle, but mother Rona would be stepped off just a little from the others. Still close, still touching, maybe with a hand on one other's shoulder or back, but turned away, looking out into the bay. Togetherness with a tension of longing for something else.
But in my image search, I wasn't finding quite the positions I wanted. When I tried to superimpose my imaginary family on the photos I'd collected of Larrabee State Park and Teddy Bear Cove, they weren't meshing well from a layout perspective. At the same time I gave the seal-in-the-sea idea a try. It was one of Julie's thoughts, and I liked it. I built a half-above-half-below-water scene with a seal and waves of bull kelp. A big sky for the title. It was turning out... OK. As a flat illustration it was too simple, too... friendly. The seascape needed more details. I already thought that whatever layout I landed on, I'd take the flat art and turn it into something more dimensional with shading and nuance, but as I played around with this concept, I found I was losing interest.
I did up a sample or two.
I should pause and say something about color, here. Back before the concepting even began, publisher Laura Stanfill and I talked about having the colorway for this cover be sea-glass colors. In fact, when she and I were in Spokane, Washington, for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association trade show last fall, we happened past a window displaying big wind chimes in sea-glass colors, and she said, there! Those are the colors for Julie's cover!
And I could adjust the colors, tone down the mood, add details and dimension to the seascape, take the illustration from flat to dimensional with texture and shading—there was lots I could do to turn it from a simple, scrappy design to something better—but I was also aware that my seascape could be anywhere. Sure I could research the specific aquatic flora and fauna (can you call fish fauna?) of that area of Washington, but to the untrained eye, it's just going to look like a scene under the sea.
At the same time as I pondered these things, I kept coming back to the idea of Rona by herself in the big landscape. And specifically a suggestion I'd been given about using an early scene in the book of a young Rona sitting on a rock in the cove, just out of the water, contemplating the wonder and danger of being in the above-sphere. Here's a tiny piece:
Don’t fall in love.
She’s heard those words each time she’s come ashore. To her they’re part of this world of cloud and stone, an echo of alarm. She sinks her hand deep, deep down into the fur skin she holds folded in her lap. The fur is dense and silk and the color of every beautiful colorless thing in the world. Water. Starlight. Phosphorescence. The mist on those evergreen hills.
And the other thing that I kept coming back to is this photograph of Teddy Bear Cove.
So I pivoted. And started building that cove. Starting with lines.
I was still being a little too literal with our idea of using all sea-glass colors in the design. The salmon in particular—there was something in the back of my mind that said it wasn't quite working, but I felt like I needed a warm color to offset the blues and greens, so even though white was standing out better for the title and author name, I kept trying shades of salmon.
No, not because of the author's name. Or was there something subconscious going on?
When I sent my first samples to Laura, she zeroed in on the color too. She liked the design and its various iterations but said the bright blue of the sky and the salmon of the lettering made the cover look more tropical than Pacific Northwest. She said, "I wonder about making the sky more gray, or the clouds more rainclouds, to earn the salmon colored font. Like, if that was gray or gray-blue background, the salmon wouldn't conjure Florida or whatever."
And I swear my brain went, I could make the sky gray? Like somehow I'd decided I couldn't. That the sea had to be green and the sky blue. What does it say about me that I kept myself confined in this sea-glass box? Laura and I talked about layout and lettering and details, and for the next pass, I stretched my colors, trying a gray sky, a gray-blue, even another shade of green. Straight gray looked strange, but I liked the gray-blue.
Did that gray-blue earn the salmon-colored font? Did sticking with greens in subtle variations create a nicer effect?
I sent a handful more samples to Laura...
...and she sent some on to Julie, including one or two of the seal-under-the-sea design. Happily, Julie really liked the Rona-on-the-rock concept, and she chose her favorite of the samples.
She was glad that Rona on her rock didn't mimic the famous image of The Little Mermaid, something she'd worried about when suggesting that scene for cover imagery, but "there’s still the potential for it to read as 'girl and her animal friend,'" so I tinkered with the seal in the water. That seal was a holdover from my earlier design, one that Laura had even said looked like it was smiling. I had selected the photo of that particular seal in my early image search because of the position of the body and the clarity of the picture, which would make it easier to reproduce, but yes, it's a particularly cute and friendly seal. I liked what Julie had to say when we asked her for her thoughts on adjusting the seal:
"I think part of the issue is the sparkle in the eye. I'll paste a link below with a good opening photograph where the eyes look almost vacant and fathomless—more alien, more depths of the sea. You don't know what they're thinking."
More alien, more depths of the sea.
And, "Seals really are plump but they're also just big and sprawling, and from some angles their heads are almost elongated. If you scroll down past the tearing-up meat photos at the link (how's that for not-cute? 😄), there are a couple of photos of longer heads above the water."
The link was really helpful—and actually, one of the things I had wanted to tinker with, which I hadn't gotten around to yet, was the angle of the seal's head. I had wanted to position my seal as I had in the layout because of the way it interacted with the placement of the author's name, but in simply plopping my original seal into that position, I ended up with its head angled in a way that looked kind of like it was looking at Rona... but not really.
So I drew out and then filled in a new seal head...
Shading
“Thank you. But I wouldn’t know where to put it.” A book. Jack could find her a book. They stand at the edge of the sea, and you could chase the sun across that open space your whole life long and never catch it. No wonder she can’t remember so much space—more than anyone can ever hold, and in the face of all of that? He would give her a book.
Imagine seeing the world that way: sorting everything you know onto pages and shelves. Ridiculous. Except that Rona has fingers, hands. And what are they for, if not to gather and sort out everything there is to know?
Like Jack would gather it. Like Jack would teach her.
It’s obvious.
He won’t keep her from falling. Jack is as lost as she. Wherever he stands he will always see those trains he hasn’t taken: all those things he can’t understand but will reach for all the same. That’s why he’s what she needs. If you’re going to fall, you want to be with someone who understands falling.
Someone who will know how you should be caught.
“It’s a pretty bay,” she says.
He looks to the water and shrugs, his shoulders a frame, a holding place against the sky. “I could have done worse than end up here,” he says.
Don’t fall in love. But she is falling in love, has fallen, can’t even remember when it was she fell. There was a shore. An edge to the sea. A line that marked the difference between one thing and the next and she has crossed it recklessly, and she is reckless still. It doesn’t matter if she is afraid. “It’s pretty here,” she says. “But the cove where I first met you is prettier.”
He moves his eyes to hers and she can feel the air come swiftly in his giving and taking it. The space between them shifts. Everything shifts on the shore: Once, this whole marina was underwater. Every moment slips away and another takes its place, and she knows already she’ll never grasp as much as she desires. Everything changes. But Jack looks at her like she is the place where all of it begins.
He says, “All right.”
