{1050 words – 4-minute read}

Over a 2-year period of working on my memoir, A MEMORY MOSAIC, the metaphors that inspired me and drove me forward evolved. What inspired me first was the tree I looked at every day out my backyard window of my new home (top left – an image I shared on Ink Authors back then and wrote about).

For me, “writing a book” is more than writing a manuscript. It’s a holistic project. I am blessed, or suffer with, a sort of creative synesthesia. Although the very early stages of writing involve the simplest of methods — that is, typing materials in basic Text Edit format — once the book’s organization takes shape, my personal creative process has always involved not just writing a manuscript but designing the book. Seeing the typography and layout, the maps and graphics, the table of contents, and the cover front and back all feed my thoughts and understanding as I am still writing the first draft.

Even if eventually my book moves from self-publishing to a traditional publishing house and they override my typographic choices or my book design, what I create along the way helps me focus my creation. So one day, as I began to imagine cover designs with the tree metaphor in mind, I googled “tree illustrations” and hit “Images.” Magically, the work of an artist living in Nova Scotia transfixed me.

This led to seeking out tree illustrations and quickly finding a mosaic work by artist Catherine Van Der Woerd (top middle). In finding this image, I found a new metaphor — a mosaic — which generated a title for my book and a method and guiding principle for creating a memoir. However, when I showed this cover design to fellow members of a Facebook writing group, people were confused. “What did the tree have to do with a trek in Nepal, the central event of the memoir?” they asked. “Nothing,” I answered.

Back to the drawing board, now setting the tree imagery aside and relying less on that metaphor. I picked up on the mosaic theme. I couldn’t find a good real-life mosaic to use for a possible cover. So I created a cover with an abstract design (top right). I was happy to have it . . . for a few days.

This was when I realized that, though I couldn’t find a good real-life mosaic image, I had found a mosaic artist I loved. I contacted her and showed her the cover I had made using her tree mosaic, and explained that I was interested in her making me a glass mosaic work. I did explain that it may be a while before I was sure I knew what I wanted, although I had an idea.

I set out to make a Photoshop collage out of a number of photo images, from which I would create an imaginary scene capturing the terraced hillsides of the Himalayan foothills, the rhododendrons that flourish in the foothills, and the first sighting of snowcapped mountains in the distance (bottom, left). The execution was crude, the photographs relatively low-resolution, and my cutting and pasting of elements extensive. I showed my rough “sketch” to Catherine to find out if this was a design she could create in glass, how large it might have to be, etc. Yes, she could do it. It had its challenges.

As rough a rendering as this was, this did become the working cover I used in PDF drafts of my memoir for more than a year, starting in Fall 2021. Over that year, I tweaked the image a bit. Still, the rough nature of this cover began to annoy me. Moreover, around Thanksgiving 2022 I finally had a completed draft suitable to share with a few select people. I needed something better for the PDF I would send beta readers, explaining that it was yet to be transformed into a mosaic.

Beyond this, for three reasons, I needed the physical printed book. First, I knew my partner, Becky, preferred to read the memoir off-screen. And I wanted her to be the first person to hold a physical copy of my book in hand. Second, A Memory Mosaic offers space for readers to write. Yes, one can use the Comment feature of PDFs, but that doesn’t answer whether the design idea I had of lined space after each chapter would work in practice. Third, I needed to see how the colors would translate from on-screen to on-cover. Often, vibrant images on a screen print darker or flatter. Fourth, I needed a simplified image with the more distracting details washed away, as well as an image with a touch of artistic panache to offer Cathy.

Photoshop came to the rescue in the form of filters. Sadly, the “mosaic” filter was disappointing. Instead of rendering an artistic mosaic, it rendered a tiled bathroom floor. The “watercolor” filter was the solution, smoothing over the photo collage’s rough edges and low resolution (bottom, middle).

Just after New Year’s 2023, Cathy set to work. A month later the mosaic was done and the typographic elements adjusted and put in place (bottom, right).

This last graphic is not the final cover. Nor does this graphic truly capture the textures, lustre and sparkle of the glass pieces. Cathy’s glass mosaic artwork, beautifully framed and hung in a window, is magnificent. I went through all sorts of experimentation with Photoshop to see if I could maintain that sense of glass. Alas, those experiments proved that, as magnificent as the artwork is, it was much too complex an image to use as cover art.

I chose to use a photo of the work that Cathy took with it placed on a light table. This kept the colors but smoothed out much of the texture. (you can still see some of the texture in the white pieces of the mountain and the dark green behind my name.

From there, I went through tweaking the colors as well as playing with the typographic elements, engaging in similar sorts of evolution as the evolution I’ve described and shown here. Look at the final, published cover and it will look very familiar. But almost every element has changed in some way. In a sense, the lower-right rendition was the completed first draft; the cover on the published book is the result of a multi-stage editing process.