Prep Work, Part 3

I'll be meeting with James next week concerning the cover for Discarded. James (if you're a newcomer to the blog and don't know already) did the cover for Self-Portrait In Fire years ago, but that was never a commissioned piece. James was introduced to me by Cindy Williams, a then co-worker at the Brigham, who knew I was looking for a cover artist and then introduced me to his numerous sketchbooks. A page from his "Warped City" series in one book (my name for it, not his) seemed perfect for the cover and reflected my mood, having just recently chosen the city over like with my girlfriend (albeit by way of her becoming my ex girlfriend and having me leave her home in the Rhode Island boonies).

We've had a couple of other collaborations since. Some early attempts with comic scripts I had written for another friend years ago, a piece that just missed getting printed in The Comics Interpreter, a couple of others. None of it's seen print, though, and we haven't done as much as work together as we would like. I'm going to see if James would mind if I posted some of that work here.

James doesn't do art professionally, so he's not used to deadlines. I haven't worked steadily in the professional world as a writer for some time, so it's been hard for me to meet a deadline for myself and coordinate well with someone else's very different work schedule. A good remedy for this is an early start. Still, James and I do a lot of our work based on our obsessions, so the fact that he is psyched for this cover is a good sign that our creative paths are crossing and we should keep going with this project.

The Discarded book likely won't even begin the printing process until next year, but it's a good idea--since I'm working with a publisher who has never seen much of James' work--that we start now. A while back, I gave James a synopsis of what I'm looking for in the cover.

I don't want so much a visual interpretation of one of the poems as much as a piece that helps to sum up them all. With that goal, I'm hoping to get from him a depiction of trash day from the perspective I had when I was doing weekly cleanings of the Gates Street apartment in Southie, taking apart and throwing away pieces of the lives of not one but several roommates spread out over three years. This meant so much stuff that I had to take some of it with me and I still am not rid of some pieces. Whole beds, desks, diplomas, nothing was sacred. Almost everything had to go to save my sanity as I prepared my own move. It's one of the memories that stuck out the most when I was finishing the book.

I'm hoping James reads this and that it's made a little clearer than the rambling mess of an email that I first sent him (I was going to reproduce it here but apparently deleted it). If he's cool with it, I'll post some drafts here, leading up to the final version.