a moment in the day: enough

Birthdays in the social media era. Stephen is downstairs whipping cream (I can hear that scraping buzz of beaters against bowl) and I'm sitting at the computer going through my newsfeed, thanking people for their sweet greetings. 

There's a lot you can say about the negatives of social media, but on your birthday, it's a lovely parade of people. You scroll and like, scroll and comment, and it's a little like getting birthday cards but moremoremore, and all I can think is, look at all of these people I've been privileged to know. It's kind of like when they say your life flashes in front of your eyes, but it's all your people flashing in front of your eyes. And you don't have to die. 

When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, all I felt like was a loser. I wonder how I would have felt about myself had I had the chance to sit and watch this parade of people each stop by to say hello.

Hello.

I keep thinking about that thing President Biden said in his inauguration speech. It's funny. The pomp and excitement of that day is a blur now, but I always remember three words he said. Enough of us. 

I can't even remember exactly what he was talking about, now, but I remember how that phrase made me stop. And think. And write it down.

Alright, I'm looking it up now. He said, "In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward."

He was talking about the Civil War, the Great Depression, World Wars, 9/11. He was talking about racism and nationalism and maybe the pandemic too. With all the negativity in the country, with all the negativity in all the people in the country, there's always been enough of us who strive to do the right thing. Just those three words made me feel better about the country I was living in. And now, sitting here scrolling through, watching this parade of lovely people, I think, yeah, you all are the enough of us.

a moment in the day: group

Steve and I walk down the hall to Liz' loft just like old times, just like before the pandemic, heading to writing group together. 

Everything in this corridor looks crisp and new. The bright raspberry-painted wall at the end by her door: is that the same color as it used to be? Every step of this familiar walk, that Steve and I have taken once a month for years, seems both beautifully old-hat and utterly new somehow.

I push open Liz' door and we walk through. Voices inside. My breath swells against my ribcage. This is our first non-Zoom meeting and my first unmasked, undistanced gathering since the before times. I hurry my step down the short front hall and then here we are—Steve, Liz, Kathleen, me—all fully-vaxxed, all crowded together at the edge of the kitchen doing something we haven't done in so long. Hugging. 

Liz' black curls tickle my face. Kathleen holds too tight and too long and too wonderful. I don't want to let go. 

When I do, she tells us she and her son hugged so hard once that it started to cut off the circulation in her neck and, still mid-clasp, she told him, "I think I'm going to pass out." And did.

Stories bounce back and forth between us as we move into the living room where Robert is waiting remotely on Zoom from his home out of town. "Robert!" I say. His face so small on the little laptop screen.

I drop my bags and take the plastic container of appetizers back across the room for warming in the kitchen nook where Liz and Kathleen have returned, chatting as they try to work the top off a bottle of pink wine. I come around behind them at the counter. Their backs to me. 

"No, we used to do it all the time when I was a kid," Liz is saying. "For fun. Like all the time."

"And there's that thing," Kathleen says, "where people do it for a sexual high."

I pull the top off my tupperware container just enjoying listening to snippets of their conversation. I realize they're still on the ways in which cutting off the circulation can make someone pass out.

"There's a name for that."

"Autoerotic... asphyxiation."

I dip my head in between them. "So, here I am, my very first unmasked, undistanced get-together, and what are we talking about? Autoerotic asphyxiation."

And this might be—not sure but might be—even better than the hugs. Laughing together in person again.

a moment in the day: crown

Stephen and I are just back from getting our second covid shots. We have a few moments before I need to be off upstairs to get on Zoom for my writing group. He's going to head out into the studio to get to work, but I make him wait and I run from the room, coming back with two Christmas crackers, one gold foil paper, one silver. I hand them both out to him and he laughs. I tell him to take his pick.

It will be two weeks before we're fully vaccinated, but I feel like we should celebrate, just a little. With as precious as these shots are, with as difficult as it has been for many to get appointments—and more so in other places in the world—I've tried to think of the vaccination wait as one, long, rolling Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever big holiday people would wait for, all year, when they were kids. Something to try to anticipate with excitement rather than impatience. I used to think about erecting a tree in the house with lights and putting names underneath it, a new name each time someone I loved got vaccinated.

But who puts up a Christmas tree in the spring? So these will have to do.

We each take the ends of our Christmas crackers in our hands. These ones are the kind that don't make a pop sound when you open them, but still, Nicholas runs from the room. We count one, two, three. Yank our crackers open. The loot falls on the floor. The paper crown, the slip of paper with a joke on it, and for each of us, a little prize like from a Crackerjack box. Wait. Is that why they call them Crackerjacks?

My prize is a weird, little keychain with a bottle opener shaped like a dead fish.

We put the paper crowns on our heads. Shiny gold foil. We ask each other Christmas jokes. 

What do you call Santa Claus when he goes down the chimney and the fire is lit?

Krisp Kringle.

"That's kind of violent," I say when Stephen reads me the answer.

When I turn to go off to writing group, my paper crown falls off my head and floats to the floor. I pick it up. Put it back on. Head upstairs.

a moment in the day: ready

I head to our front door, to go out into the world, to pick up something for work. Stephen follows to say goodbye.

"Got what you need?" he asks.

These weird days, when we go out so seldom. When every simple excursion feels like an event. Something you've got to plan for, dress up for, think about. It's been so long since going out into the world was a regular thing. 

I pat my pocket to make it jingle.

"Got my keys."

Raise the crumpled bit of cloth in my hand.

"Got my mask."

Look down. 

Look at my sock feet.

"Don't got my shoes."

Book Cover: Quint

Recently, I finished the book cover design for a novel called Quint. It's based on the lives of the Dionne Quintuplets and is written by an author named Dionne, a fact that somehow I didn't even notice when I was first talking to 7.13 Books editor Hasanthika Sirisena about the project. 

I knew of the Dionne quintuplets from features I used to see of them very early in their lives when I was paging through newspaper clippings and microfilm, doing research for an abandoned book project years ago.

Dionne Irving's novel takes the lives of its quints, the Phalene Quintuplets, from their birth through... well, let me let Hasie's words, from an early email detailing the project, explain it:

Told from a variety of narrative perspectives, the novel, set starting in the 1940s details the quintuplets’ birth, their removal from their parents’ home and their rise to fame, which coincides with the construction of Quintland, a “theme park” where thousands of paying visitors observe the girls as they go about their daily routines—playing, bathing, eating, sleeping—performing their lives more than living them.

The idea of a theme park dedicated to you, celebrating you, imprisoning you was so powerful that I knew it had to be part of the imagery for the cover. 

As for visual style, Hasie and Dionne were interested in the cleanness of silhouettes and cut-out art, like that of artist Kara Walker.

You can check out more about Kara Walker here.

I loved her art and the idea of cut-out silhouettes and started gathering fodder for my own silhouette vignette representing the book and its stars. The five sisters would be front and center, of course, surrounded by the trappings (pun intended) of their amusement park. I pictured the fancy entranceway to the park with maybe the book's title emblazoned across the big welcome sign. One of those ornate, old signs like this one I found:

Without the severed-head-wielding cyclops, of course.

And below the entryway sign and surrounding the quints would be the ghoulish, delighted faces of the public. Oversized, carnivallike. Claustrophobic.

In looking online for examples for my Quintland entrance, I stumbled upon photos of the actual Quintland where the Dionne Quintuplets lived and performed their lives before the public.

Oh my god, it was a real place! 

I'd had no idea. I thought the amusement park was the author's own invention. I gathered some of the pictures and put them into a file folder, mostly to just have them, because wow. I named the file folder oh my god, it was a real place.

My first version of the cover had the girls represented as older. In talking back and forth with Hasie, I'd asked what age would be good and she suggested pre-teen. I found photos of a girl of that age in various different positions to use as I drew my silhouettes out in illustrator.

When I sent off the early samples and Hasie sent them on to Dionne for her look, Dionne preferred younger sisters. I went back and found a girl of five to use as my model. And I added in the big hair bows the Dionne sisters used to wear all the time—sort of a signature look in their younger years. 

Hasie, Dionne and I talked a lot about color, about placement of the giant faces of the public (how close in or far away from the girls to put them), and Dionne asked for a more straight-up font for her name. They liked the light behind the girls and I added a hint of light behind the sign/title as well to bring it out. And we finally had a cover we liked.

Quint will be out on August third. More info on this book and others in the 7.13 lineup can be found here. Here's an excerpt from the opening of the book.

Mother

When she started bleeding, she thought for certain she’d lost the child. The blood was bright red, the kind the midwife had warned her about. The kind that meant surely this child, like the others before it, had died inside her. Again, her body had failed her, had shown her that she wasn’t really a woman. In a month or so, he would climb on top of her and do it again. And she would get pregnant again. And they would do this bebe/non bebe ritual again. At least that’s how it’d been before. She looked to the picture of the Virgin on the wall and was reminded of how Notre Dame had failed her time and time again.

So, she was surprised an hour later when after she had hoisted her mass into the kitchen for water, she felt that flutter. The hint of an elbow or knee, she couldn’t be sure, pressing against her from the inside. That thing that told her that this was life. She looked again to the picture of the Virgin Mary hanging over the bed. She could see her from the sink, like the virgin was calling to her, like she was beckoning her and she floated, wet hands, back onto the bed where she spent most of her days.

The next thing she remembered he was shaking her, and, when she opened her eyes and saw him, her husband, standing there, it was like she had been waiting for him all her life. Or at least waiting for someone like him.

“Are you alright?” he kept saying and then finally, “Answer me!”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, of course.”

But she couldn’t get up, couldn’t sit up in the bed. She remembered the blood and her hand flew between her legs. She drew that hand up to her face to inspect it for any hint of red, but there was none.

“What is it?” he asked. The hard edge in his voice gone. He sat at the end of the bed smoking a cigarette and watching her.

“There was blood today. Earlier. But I think I felt the baby move after that.”

He stared at her with large, unblinking eyes and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, or what he understood.

“This happens with the cows too.” He dropped a bit of ash on the floor, and she tried to imagine when and how she would be able to clean it up. “Sometimes they bleed a little at first, a little blood, but then later on, a perfectly healthy calf.”

There were only two rooms in the little house, and it felt like his? cigarette smoke filled them both. She wanted badly to open a window, to breathe in clean, crisp January air that cut right through her lungs in a way that both stung and felt delicious.

He got up finally and went into the front room, lighting a second cigarette on the stove, a wedding present ordered from Sears & Roebuck. It was the newest thing in the house and took cords after cord of wood to heat. And while the house was wired for electricity, money came too infrequently to keep it on regularly.

Book Cover Redux: Dispatches from Anarres

Last November, Forest Avenue Press did a cover release for our next anthology, Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, conceived and edited by Susan DeFreitas. Then in January, we got feedback from our distributor, Publishers Group West, that they were concerned the cover skewed too sci-fi. 

My original concept, when I first started sending out early samples, had been ALL-SCI-FI-ALL-THE-TIME: a huge silver interplanetary communicator shooting out into space. Susan had brought me back to earth a bit by reminding me that Le Guin's works are equally divided between science fiction and fantasy—and that our collection Dispatches from Anarres is as well. To add that fantasy element, she had the cool idea of filling the sky with the silhouettes of flying dragons.

When in January our representatives at PGW brought up their own too-much-sci-fi concern, we said, hey, but dragons, and they said, what dragons?, and we were like, what do you mean, what dragons?, but it was true: when viewed in any smaller-form that more subtle element did kind of disappear. 

So I set out to find a way to get those dragons to stand out more without making the cover too busy in the process. We were getting pretty late in the game to be tinkering with the cover, but it was important to get it right. I was playing with color and brightness and contrast when I started...

...to have second thoughts.

About the whole thing.

PGW's concerns, Susan's early concerns, what if I was getting this thing all wrong?

In an email to Forest Avenue Press publisher Laura Stanfill in which we were discussing little changes like font sizes, I snuck in:

There's also part of me that is wondering... is this cover right? Are we getting the Le Guin right? Should it be an alien landscape instead? 

Because Le Guin was always more focused on the natural world than technology, even in her sci-fi writings. One of the representatives at PGW had called her work nature writing. And a lot of her own book covers reflect that.

As soon as I wrote that what if to Laura—what if I'd been getting it wrong all along—I knew I was right.

You might think, um, what are you thinking, deciding to go completely back to the drawing board so late in the process, I mean, what are you going to do, conjure up an alien landscape like magic?

Well, yes. That's what I was going to do.

It just so happens I have a brother who creates alien landscapes. 

Ever since he was a kid, my brother Frank Little has been creating and refining a world. A specific world all his own, with maps he drew, stories he wrote, words in different languages, king lists for dynasties of rule. As he became an adult, that obsession drew him to learn computer modeling programs.

Look at this!

And this!

What would you do if this thing cropped up in your backyard?

You can't really see the detail on these because of the thin format of my blog, which I'd change but I'm afraid it'll throw off the layout of sooo many posts so I always leave it alone... but you can check out more of his work on DeviantArt here or on his website here.

The night after I wrote that what-if note to Laura, I started scrolling through his artwork, hoping I might find something that would work. When I came across this, I had one of those visceral moments: I knew it was perfect.

Anarres, the inhabited moon in Le Guin's book The Dispossessed, is a barren desert of a place, with very little animal and plantlife. We didn't expressly need the setting of the book cover to be Anarres, but it was important that it not not be Anarres, if that makes sense. Not only did the terrain in Frank's "Hanging Artichoke" feel right, I could already picture what I would do with it. I imagined a whole bunch more sky above the cliff (I could add that in) and a woman standing on the edge looking out over the desert vista as if awaiting word from those Dispatches that had been sent from her world to the next.

I wondered if Frank would be okay with me... getting my fingers into his artwork. Adding more sky. Tossing a woman onto his mountaintop. When I texted to ask about it, he said, referencing Le Guin, "Well since I recently reread all of her stuff I would love to have one of my pictures involved..."

It was strange to go back to square one and reposition the text after I'd gotten so used to looking at the layout of the original book cover. This new approach and new artwork wanted a completely new layout, new colors, new fonts. When I sent Laura my first [new] draft, I punned, "This is soooo different from what we had before. It's like night and day. Get it?"

I played around with slight variations on text and placement. For some I added a little more sun in the sky—and even a silhouette of one of Susan's dragons.

But dragons don't exist on Anarres (birds don't even exist on Anarres), so we chucked the dragon and packaged up the sample we thought was the best of the batch, Laura and me, and sent it Susan's way. 

(Please don't notice how many times I miscapitalized Le Guin above. I knew how to spell it. I knew. But somehow I goofed.)

It was so important to both of us that Susan like the cover of the book she'd conceived. And it was so important that PGW think it was a cover that would sell the book. So many considerations go into the creation of a book cover, and I realized, as I worked on this one, that we had more people we wanted to please than ever before. 

There was the editor and the distributor, there was the publisher and the cover designer (I like liking things). There was Frank whose artwork I was using. There were alllll the authors who'd written stories for the book. But even beyond this, there was the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her memory, her family, her legion of fans. 

Eek, that's a lot of people.

We started to get feedback. PGW loved it. For Susan, it wasn't sci-fi enough, didn't tell enough story. My brother joked, "Ok yeah that's the coolest thing I've ever seen." Laura then sent the sample to a couple Le Guin experts, one being our copy editor Bailey Potter, and her feedback: women on Anarres don't wear dresses.

Oops.

To Susan's concerns about the amount of sci-fi, I thought, OK, this new cover, that was like night and day to the old cover, I think it needs to go back to night.

Or maybe...

What if instead of the light blue of day or the deep blue of night we take a left turn into red?

And added, in that red sky, the planet to Anarres' moon: Urras.

A la:

I started by getting my fingers even deeper into Frank's artwork. With his blessing, I cut the sky out around his cliff and hanging artichoke. I made two overlapping files, one that was just cliff-artichoke and one that contained the desert vista. The biggest challenge working with the artwork was darkening that vista and getting those colors to fade nicely up into the sky color. 

Then I built a planet. That took a while. Planets are big. I also worked longer than you want to know to build a new outfit for my woman, with lots of feedback from Susan, Laura, and our two Ursula K. Le Guin experts, writer Sarah Cypher and our copy-editor Bailey Potter. The planet was built mostly in Illustrator, the woman in Paint Shop Pro. I added stars the the sky. I took them out again. I know I'm grossly oversimplifying this part of the process, but heck, this blog post is already the size of the indefinable fathoms between here and Anarres. In the end, Laura shared with me that Susan said:

"This image feels—almost like someone contemplating the cosmos, other civilizations—or like someone standing on another planet contemplating Earth. That feels like the story implied by this image, and it could not be more perfect."

Ah! That felt good.

(Stand-in blurb, notwithstanding. That, as always, will be updated down the line.)

Dispatches from Anarres will be published by Forest Avenue Press this coming November, with stories from (big breath) TJ Acena, Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher, Stevan Allred, Jason Arias, Stewart C. Baker, Jonah Barrett, Curtis Chen, Tina Connolly, Mo Daviau, Rene Denfeld, Molly Gloss, Rachael K. Jones, Michelle Ruiz Keil, Juhea Kim, Jessie Kwak, Jason LaPier. Fonda Lee, David D. Levine, um me, Sonia Orin Lyris, Tracy Manaster, James Mapes, C.A. McDonald, Tim O’Leary, Ben Parzybok, Nicole Rosevear, Arwen Spicer, Lidia Yuknavitch and Leni Zumas, and with a foreword by David Naimon. 

More information is here. More on editor (and writer) Susan DeFreitas is here. Big thanks to Frank Little for his art, and to Susan, Laura, the folks at PGW, and our LeGuin specialists Bailey Potter and Sarah Cypher for all their input.

Here's a sneak peek story snippet for you. From "Each Cool Silver Orb a Gift" by Nicole Rosevear

*

Helena had not yet been born when the long war, the last war, began, but she had been in the Southlake settlement from its beginning, providing her unfocused childhood labor to the construction of communal households, dining and medical facilities, gathering spaces, and gardens. Over decades, she had moved her way through the full set of work cycles, adding her name to the lottery of women eligible to sit on the Council late in her fourth decade, knowing the chances of being drawn were slim. She did not need that particular honor to hold a deep pride in her small part in the building of Southlake, this newly gentled world, made better for all by the ruling hands of women.

When Sasha, the last remaining member of the original Council, added her name to the list of those withdrawing from the work cycles, Helena attended the lottery, excited to witness the drawing of a new member, a rare and momentous event. The afternoon was cool and muggy, the hazy sun unable to break through the clouds. When the name was drawn and called, she did not recognize it as her own, looking around at the women, men, and thirds gathered in the main square for this other Helena. When she realized others were looking back at her rather than past her, that she was that Helena, she cried out in surprise. To step into the shoes of one of the original Council members was an honor she had not dreamed of.

Walking back to her household, the flurry of conversations and introductions already a blur, the metal of her new Council pin cool against her throat, Helena passed a group of three men and two thirds in an alcove near a dining hall. She heard the tail end of a hissed whisper, one of the thirds saying, “. . . their pawns to being yours.” When they saw her approaching, the man directly facing her tapped his collarbone twice, near the spot Council members wore their pins. The group turned quickly away from each other, one of the thirds offering her a casual open-handed greeting.

“Afternoon,” she said, returning the gesture. It seemed that they did not want her to have heard them, and it was easy enough to imagine she hadn’t.

a moment in the day: 365

It's been a whole year.

According to the tally I've been keeping of our particular days of social distancing, it is day three-hundred and sixty-five.

Night, actually, Saturday night. We're doing one of the most exciting things we do these days. We ordered a pizza.

Stephen put in the call, and now, masks on, we're walking down together to pick it up.

And music is playing. Weirdly. The streets are full of it. Jazz, something that sounds a little noir, keyboards and saxophone, I think. A drum kit.  It has that distinct timbre of music amplified by a microphone. 

How utterly strange to hear live music.

We reach the end of the block, and the little business district opens up around us, coffee shops, restaurants. The shut-up movie theater with its marquee declaring, "Intermission continues." As we cross the street we can see that the music is coming from the little wine bar a few doors down. Their outdoor seating area, built out into the street where a couple cars normally would be parked, is a structure of wooden slats and a roof, plastic sheeting making walls on three sides. 

The plastic is for holding off rain but it also holds in the air. Keeps it pocketed there. 

Through the oily sheen of the half-transparent plastic those shapes of color are people sitting at tables. Masks off, eating and drinking. The jazz combo playing at one end. Breath blasting through a horn.

Here across the street, the pizza place is windows framed with Christmas-colored twinkle lights, and two different doors, one for going in, one for coming out. Stephen goes through the in door to pay for the pizza, and I wait on the sidewalk. Listen to dangerous music.

It sounds pretty good.

Glance to my right and now, approaching under the marquee overhang of the shut-up theater is a group of four people. Chatting happy. Unmasked. 

I step backward into the recess of the out door. The dangerous music follows me in. It sounds slightly different in my pocket of air. A little less alive, or is that my imagination?

The group doesn't seem to notice me, laughing as they walk by.