from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
This Sunday and Monday, our Intro to Publishing students will commence printing the covers for our newest Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award winner, The Distance That Isn’t Miles, by Anthony (Tony) J. Albright. We’ll meet at The Hunter Times, located at Bonanzaville, where pressmen Allan Burke and Sawyer Flynn have been prepping the Chandler & Price letterpress machine and making sure our printing plate is working in good order.
The selected cover concept for The Distance That Isn’t Miles.
This collection is about a Choctaw man (the author) who enters the military and becomes a parachute rigger. That means he’s in charge of packing parachutes for his army peers to use when they jump.
After reading and discussing the poetry collection, students prepared a creative brief for our designer, Deb Tanner, who does the bulk of our design work. The brief included senses and colors and emotions evoked by the poems, along with a summary of the collection and favored poem samples. We expressed a desire to add a design embellishment, perhaps something to represent parachute fabric or other textures to resonate with a rigger’s work.
Tony also provided specifics about parachutes; rigger uniforms and colors; suspension lines for parachutes; planes and helicopters commonly used with paratroopers; and more. He included these excerpts from his Author Questionnaire:
This book is therapy for me. I was able to cast many of my personal stories . . . and explore the ways in which my branching web of choices led to one outcome or another. In writing these poems, I found myself returning to the emotional residue of those years: the impressions, sensory flashes, the moments that never fully left my body . . . [These impressions/sense memories] reveal my in-most thoughts of my journey to climbing out of the circumstances of my childhood and end just short of the series of events that led to my successful and comfortable life of today. In that sense, the book became a way of honoring the younger version of myself who survived those years. At the same time, a literature of the Choctaw Nation is currently lacking, especially in specific use of the language . . . the inclusion of Chahta Anumpa isn’t decorative–it’s structural. It’s how memory actually sounds in my mind, how identity assets itself even in places designed to strip it away.
Our designer provided five concepts for us to choose from. Here is an excerpt from Deb’s description of the concept we chose.
These are variations using the silk ribbon woven through the cover. The first page shows what would be printed; the last page shows how the ribbon could be woven into the cover. When reading about being a rigger, I imagine it to be a very precise, exacting job, which is the direction I went with the text and feel of this option. Very structured, very secure. The woven ribbon also evokes the sense of a road, which references miles.
Upon seeing the concepts, Tony wrote:
I think the one I like best is the last one in the 5-page file, where the sage is woven through the title and continues on the other side. I think it’s a good analog for a journey in green with multiple fits and starts.
Our author, students, designer, and I were unanimous in our selection! We have since chosen a brown cardstock and a sage-colored ribbon. Once the covers are printed, we’ll thread the ribbon to complete the full cover effect.
In the next couple of weeks, after the ink dries on the covers, we’ll add the satin ribbon embellishments. Then, in early October, we will print the interior pages at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. There, the students will print, fold, and assemble all the pages; stitch; and trim each chapbook. Tony will join us, and he’ll autograph each copy as it rolls off the assembly line. Copies will be available for purchase upon our return.
If you’d like to reserve limited edition copies, we are accepting advance purchases here: The Distance That Isn’t Miles.
