I’ve become a book cover!

Cover of "Tongue party" by Sarah Rose Etter
Cover of Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter

Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

My original photo of Jess Larson's girdle as posted on Flickr
"A tongue tied in knots" (My original photo of Jess's girdle as posted on Flickr)

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.

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Horizontal Grandeur submissions

Each year the Stevens County Historical Society has hosted a juried art show entitled “Horizontal Grandeur” that celebrates the flat lands we call home. I had a few photos in the first “Horizontal Grandeur” show in 2006, but haven’t submitted anything since then, mostly due to being swamped and such. WeatherGrrrl gave me a swift kick in the butt this year, though, and I’ve submitted the following three pieces for their consideration. Now we wait and see what the jury thinks :-)

Photo of snow covered fields in SW Minnesota
Shoulder and fenceline
Photo of winter fields in SW Minnesota at sunset with the Buffalo Ridge windfarm in the distance
Traveling through time
A night-time photo of the office at a grain elevator in Elbow Lake, Minnesota.
Elbow Lake, Minnesota, 7 August 2009

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