The first time I tried to design one of my book covers was five years ago. I had an idea in my head about what I wanted for 52 Things I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, so I made a very terrible mock-up and sent it off to a fantastic graphic designer who was able to take my basic concept and majorly zhuzh it up. Their version made my basic mock-up look pretty kindergarten-y, which, let’s face it, it kind of was. But what did I care? I loved the final cover that the graphic designer created:

The second time I tried to design—if you can even call it that—one my book covers was three years ago, and I only knew I wanted to use a particular photograph by the incredible photographer Michael Knemeyer. I had seen a photo on his Instagram feed of a brooding sky over an Ohio field and instantly felt sure that the photo accurately captured the overall themes of Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning. I begged Michael to let me use the photograph and then sent it to the publisher, who then sent it to their design team, and that design team fiddled and did magic graphic stuff that is way over my head and made a cover I loved. Yay! Mission accomplished:

Brooding sky on book cover for Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning: poems

This year, for the first time, I began to wonder if I would ever be able to design my own book cover.

I’ve always wished I had talent in the visual arts. For most of my life I have claimed to have so little visual artistic talent that I could barely draw a stick figure.

But lately I’ve been rethinking these claims. I’ve been thinking about how sometimes people tell us what we are capable or incapable of, and we believe them. And sometimes we tell ourselves what we can’t do—without considering that maybe we can.

In 2020, I decided to take a doodling class—something I had never allowed myself before because I always assumed it was a lost cause.

But what if it wasn’t? Can anyone learn to doodle?

I can tell you now, the answer is yes. Maybe everyone can’t doodle well, but yes, anyone can doodle. I was one of those anyones.

That class taught me, more than anything, to simply allow myself to try. It took down that lost-cause fence I had erected and gave me the confidence to play on the page. Since then, I’ve been doing exactly that: playing on paper—with Sharpie fine-line pens and Crayola markers, with brushes and acrylics, with gouache. And while my doodling wouldn’t win awards or sell at an art gallery, it is more than drawing a stick figure.

Which leads me to this: in early spring I came up with an idea in my head for the cover art for my forthcoming book (a poetry collection), Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems. I tried to recreate the cover art on paper with my acrylics. It was pretty miserable—not only was what I created nothing like what was in my head, it was a pretty awful piece of work. A couple of months passed, and I decided to try and find a photograph of the art that was in my head, or at least a photo that approximated it. I succeeded! Another yay!

And then I decided, well, why not try and design the cover myself? So I fiddled and found a font I liked and moved the art and title around and showed my publisher (Kevin Morgan Watson, Press 53), who suggested a white font instead of the gold color, and he told me the dimensions I would need and gave me a few other parameters, and then…I did what I had tried before but never accomplished: I designed my own book cover.