Because I am at heart a visual thinker, I sometimes have ideas for cover art for projects before I even have the project finished. Obviously, this is not so strange when I have some visual element to a project and I just have to choose which would make a good cover. And it's also true of reading work by others, which is where I get my ideas for the press. It's a little weirder when I have like half a full-length book mss and already am dreaming of the cover for a book that isn't even really finished yet, for poems that aren't written yet, for a manuscript not even assembled (this is true for something I am working on now.)
I've been enormously lucky that the presses I've worked with in the past invited me to have an active role in the cover design. My first book, I chose Alaina Burri-Weir's amazing photo, who I had encountered online in a number of journals and used for two previous chapbooks, a couple wicked alice print issues, and at least 2 or 3 dgp covers. (and also have a couple framed photos above my bookshelf.) For in the bird museum, we wound up using one of my random collages with some victorian flair that was in my etsy shop at the time (one I don't even seem to have a photo of elsewhere). girl show sports a piece from my spectacle series of collages, which actually came long after that manuscript, but fit perfectly. The shared properties of water and stars and little apocalypse, also my own collage work. Ditto sex & violence, which is a reworking of some of the elements in my /slash/ zine. There were a couple variations over the years.. When Sundress accepted major characters in minor films, I had no real ideas for a cover, so they turned it over to their designer, Mary Ellen Knight, who made the most perfect embodiment possible for that book. Diane Goettel. at BLP asked me about salvage and I said I wanted a Sailor Jerry mermaid and she worked all that magic on her own. Also, one of my favorite not-me designs was what Maverick Duck did for the beautiful, sinister chap. Also, how Diagram/ NMP turned my bird collage into an even more magnificent cover for another chap, feign after I was was a finalist in their contest in 2006.
When it came to designing the things I am issuing myself I chose one of a series of more illustration-like pieces for feed. They were initially planned as a visual element to accompany the hunger palace, which wound up instead being published wholly in The Journal, so never quite made it to zine form before being folded into the longer project. There is something mother and child like in the deer especially, a vulnerability. (the alternative was foxes--I went back and forth.) The deer won since they echo in more than one section of the book, but either could have worked. Since I also planned dark country as a pink book--teenage bedroom pink--I went for blue with feed. It turned out gorgeous of course, with those inky black stretches looking amazing in the glossiness (you actually can go matte or glossy and I keep choosing glossy.) The little deer down near the press imprint is my favorite part. The world of the book lends itself to a certain fanciful darkness captured in that cover.
For dark country, besides the pink, I suspected I might want a photo instead of a collage or illustration. Of what, I didn't know--I started collecting stock photos from free sites I use regularly--creepy school hallways, pine-laden woods, darkened parking lots, nighttime stretches of road.. I thought maybe vintage wallaper would be cool, since the accompanying artwork for two the series in zine form featured pieces made with it (exquisite damage and taurus) but couldn;t find the perfect one.. There were suburban elements, but also woodsy and farmland settings. Labyrinths. Girlhood bedrooms and things like 4-H ribbons and pageant trophies. Also wildlife and farm animals--the dead deer in beautiful, sinister. The bloody cattle in taurus. Other women and girls littering roadsides and rivers in the Slenderman poems and in exquisite damage. I have a love of taxidermied animals as much as the fully alive ones. One one hand, hunting is terrible, but also the results, sadly beautiful and laden in so much of my more recent work (as you'll see in the next book, animal, vegetable, monster due at the end of the year.) This particular photo first jumped out at me for not only being the sort of scene one might find in the households of the women that litter the book--70's early 80's decor I remember, a roseyness that would complement the sort of pink I wanted. It's probably a contemporary photo of someones's vintage decor apartment, but it felt like it had been taken 30 years ago. Only as I started mocking it up, did I find the single, most perfect thing about the photo--the leaning, almost menacing man in the reflection of the owl embroidery piece. You almost might miss him entirely, but it was so fucking perfect it sealed the deal. I had my cover.
It's actually not always that easy. Sometimes, especially when I get stuck on a design for another author, its damn hard. But occasionally you make contact--witth the deep veins of the book, with the author's own imagination. I do incidently have the cover art or animal, vegetable, monster, lined up though the full design remains to be seen (it started out as a one-off collage I made for my patreon subscribers and in the theme of 2021--more deer, though a little deconstrcuted..lol...) I also have some future covers in mind, either from existing artwork for the automagic and collapsologies manuscripts that I just recently finished up. Even more ridiculously, another project that doesn't even have a full title and about 20 poems finished, but I can see the future cover design clear as day in my mind. We will see how that one unfolds...
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