Book Cover: Carson McClintock is Not Dead Yet

In 2024 I was honored to be asked to design the cover to Nancy Townsley's first novel Sunshine Girl, and I was so excited when, after a wonderful debut, her publisher Heliotrope Books picked up her second book. Carson McClintock is Not Dead Yet.

When Nancy and I started talking about this new cover, she sent me this description of the book to get me started.

In this era of overwhelm and chaos—when we’re clinging to hope that our shared humanity will prevail over the lust for power and the unrelenting pursuit of wealth—it’s time to get more socially engaged fiction out into the world.

Carson McClintock Is Not Dead Yet is a novel that speaks to the heart of who we are and still might be, wrapped up in a story of love, personal loss, sharp political-cultural swings, and the vision for a community of care tending to the end-of-life needs of its elderly residents. The baby boomers are coming, and Abraham Carson McClintock III and his free commune are ready.

She and publisher Naomi Rosenblatt of Heliotrope already had a concept in mind for the cover.

Nancy: "We want GREEN, as in a layered forest-y background, and a great horned owl soaring above. There are cottages at All That Matters, my imagined free commune for the indigent elderly. Also, the river is a feature."

Naomi: "YES to green forests, and owl, and yes, cottages ... and maybe a silhouette of Carson (either close-up, as Eliza is on the Sunshine Girl cover) or standing, at a distance?"

I loved their enthusiasm about the color green. And I loved the thought of absolutely filling the cover with that color. I could see green being more than just the layered forest. Carson's silhouette could be a dark green, the cabins could be shades of green, everything in the scene could be green and then I'd break the monochrome for a burst of blue sky above and our great horned owl.

I think about balance a lot when I'm working, and conceptually I like the fact that the fullness of the green and the rareness of the flash of blue sky and owl make those two elements balance. Or at least that's what I figured would happen and what I'd be working toward. And the way the eye would be drawn up to that flying owl—what that evoked in me was a feeling of hope, and that felt appropriate to the book.

I started by building my forest. Or one tree, actually:

For anyone who reads my posts, you may notice that I use these pink and blue colors often when I start building something. Is the fact that these two colors also made up my baby blanket a coincidence? I think not. OK, no, actually, they just work well as contrasting colors and I habitually grab them from the available swatches in my Illustrator color panel when I'm getting started creating things from lines and shapes.

To save time during the concepting process, I then just duplicated my single tree a number of times and arrayed them across a blue background.

I built pretty much every element in this cover the same way, and I don't think you want to slog through each separate process, so I'll just show my owl. First, I grabbed a number of flying great horned owl photos from the internet to find a potential model or two.

I chose two: one for the body...

...and one for the head.

Then in Illustrator I drew lines (there are those pinks and blues again)...

...and then created solid shapes.

In this way, I also built cabins and more greenery for my scene, plus the silhouette of Carson. For Carson, I asked Nancy for a description and she sent this:

"Carson is tall and lanky, with a big schnoz. His face was burned in a house fire about 10 years before we meet him in the book. He's now in his 80s."

She sent a short excerpt from the book that contained more detail:

"Age had humbled Carson McClintock. Humbled, changed, and astonished him. All his adult life he’d been lanky and somewhat clumsy, though generally thought to be movie-star handsome, save for his too-big aquiline nose, which he shaded from the sun by wearing stylish, generously brimmed hats. In hot weather only, July to September, Oregon’s famously truncated summer."

And then on clothing, she said:

"He might have binoculars (he's a birdwatcher). He might use a walking stick! Clothing would be loose outdoorsy pants, a denim or wool shirt, and a birding vest with pockets."

I imagined the text of the title filling the space about as much as those greens, and tried a few different fonts... 

...experimenting with how to use the blue from the sky in the text. In the end we decided on using the blue in the word Not and in Nancy's name and the light brown of the owl for a novel. I liked this comment from Naomi as we were discussing color: "I like "NOT" in blue. I like that it's the color of the sky, a meeting place between life and afterlife."

Nancy asked me to darken Carson's silhouette and to bring out the cabins more on our second pass. As we zeroed in on our design, I went back and worked on the somewhat painstaking process of making each tree individual. I perhaps could have gotten away with mostly the same tree in our array of a forest, but it's always important to me that each element in a book cover be its own and not just a duplication.

In experimenting with fonts, I deliberately included the font I used with Nancy's first book, Sunshine Girl. With both books having a socio-political bent and being published by the same press, they truly feel like sister books, so it felt appropriate to all of us that the look/style, and perhaps also the font, be similar.

Indeed in the end, the font they liked best was the Sunshine Girl font. As with Sunshine Girl, it was so nice to collaborate closely with both Nancy and Naomi on the design. And with the update of a lovely blurb from Joanna Rose, we had our cover.

Carson McClintock Is Not Dead Yet will be out May 11, 2027. More info on Nancy is here. Check out the titles from Heliotrope here. And here's a taste:

*

Up from Artemus’s throat came an involuntary whistling noise as he hovered over the sad avenues and boulevards and thoroughfares of downtown Portland, mourning for humanity. There were fewer red and blue police car flashes. The authorities had dispersed. Tonight, the veil would be thin. He left his temporary roost and started back toward his beloved island. The flight home would take less time without daytime distractions.

On his silent approach, the flickering yellow lights of farm workers’ ofrendas came into view. Artemus saw them, but the migrants in their homes didn’t see him. Nothing could give him away in the hours of deepest night, not even the bright pink band the animal rehabilitators had fastened to his talon after his fierce fight with that big bald eagle. He might have lost his life that day if not for humans with good intentions. If not for the timely phone call and the rush of the transport vehicle. The skillful folks at Cascades Owl Rescue had cared for him in his time of need, nursing him back to health before releasing him back into the wild. Eight weeks of confinement.

Like hundreds of fireflies glowing at once, the ofrendas illuminated the darkness. Descending, Artemus breathed in their magic and their mourning. He landed without a sound and stumbled around for a safe spot to rest.

It was Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.