Meredith Sue Willis: On Choosing a Book Cover Image for OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS

Mural, Gauley Bridge
Photo copyright by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved

Book cover design choices fascinate me. Those cover illustrations are what make browsing in a bookstore so pleasurable – they lure us to pick up a particular book for a closer look, flip it over to read the back cover, open it up to read the inside jacket flap. At least that’s how I browse. Only after I’ve examined the front cover image, the back cover, and the inside flap do I open the book to the first page to read the first sentence. If that opening sentence pleases me, I may even reread it with the entire first paragraph. If I’m not hooked by then, the book goes back on the shelf.

I was already familiar with the cover image for the new short story collection, OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, by Meredith Sue Willis. I happened to be with Kevin Scanlon in the town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, the day he photographed the mural at the center of town. When I learned one of those images was chosen as the cover for the book, I was already hooked. But I want you to be hooked, too, because this is a beautiful collection of stories. So, I’ll open the book for you to the first story, “Triangulation,” so that you can be hooked on that first sentence and paragraph:

“There is a process in navigation by which you locate an unknown point by forming a triangle between it—where you are standing now, for example—and two known points. From time to time, we use great events in history in this way. That was the year I got married and also the year of the great blackout. Where were you when the president was shot? When the towers fell?”

This week’s guest post is by Meredith Sue Willis. Thanks MSW!
~ Dory


IN THIS LIGHT blogger Dory Adams asked me how I chose the particular photograph we used for the cover of my second collection of Appalachian stories, Out of the Mountains, from Ohio University Press. The photo is by Dory’s husband Kevin Scanlon, and I had seen his work earlier on the internet, and used several of his images of West Virginia trains and cars and landscapes in Issue 16 (Fall 2008) of The Hamilton Stone Review. The combination of trees and hills and steel and cars and mist and old frame buildings moved me intensely: it’s the Appalachia and West Virginia that I knew growing up – mine tipples and coal cars on high trestles and always in the background the green humpy hills. So I think what I wanted for the cover of my book was actually a whole slew of Kevin’s images. One that I especially liked had a little girl on a bike and some houses and a train passing way overhead, but the folks at Ohio University Press were concerned about the legalities of images of children, and, as I said, it wasn’t any single image I was stuck on, but just the sensibility of his work.

Now here’s the funny part: I don’t really remember choosing the image of the car in front of the Gauley Bridge mural that was ultimately used. It is an image with the slightest touch of an edge, that is, the question of what is real and what is super-realism– are we looking at a real car or a painting of a car? And of course, in actual fact, we’re looking at a piece of glossy printed cardboard, not a car of all, when we look at the book, or some pixels on a CRT or LCD screen if we’re looking online.

The head of publicity at Ohio University Press says that she’s the one who made the final pick, which she cleared with me, of course. And as I said, it was one of many images that moved me, so I was fine with it.

What pleases me about it is both the edge and the insistence on the art of the photograph as well as the art of the mural. I’m generally a realistic writer, but what’s the point of literature if it isn’t artful? So the art and the calling attention to art worked for me, but so did the old car, and its implications of coming and going, and the mural as a tourist attraction.

And, really, I just adore Kevin’s photos.





Meredith Sue Willis will appear at the Kentucky Book Fair November 13th, 2010 at the Frankfort Convention Center, 405 Mero Street, Frankfort, KY. Hours are 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Meredith Sue Willis: Out of the Mountains

Meredith Sue Willis is one of those writers whose work is often overlooked – perhaps because she has been labeled as an Appalachian writer. There’s a tendency to categorize writers and books by region or genre, but the result can be limiting in unintended ways. “Appalachian writer” is a term I’ve often used myself to draw attention to the works of writers I admire from that mountain region. But it seems that there may be a stigma associated with being classified as “Appalachian” which lends itself to some widely held stereotypes about mountain people. Why does “Appalachian writer” not have the same cachet as, say, “Southern writer?” After all, Appalachia is a big place and reaches as far south as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Just as geographic regions can overlap, so can literary genres. A bestselling mystery or legal thriller can also be literary fiction. And, an Appalachian writer can also be many other things as well – including a Southern writer (Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith immediately come to mind).

In the afterword to her new book, Meredith Sue Willis writes, “This collection is called Out of the Mountains because that is where the stories come from, and so do I. . . . One of my projects in writing these stories has been to wonder, with so much slipping into the past, what is still unique about our region. I am also interested in what Appalachians retain and take along when they leave home – when they go out of the mountains – and also what Appalachian attitudes and insights contribute to the larger culture.”

I started reading Meredith Sue Willis’ work nearly a decade ago when one of her short stories had been submitted to me when I was the fiction editor of the literary journal Paper Street. I wanted to publish that piece, but the editor of another journal beat me to it. I was glad to see the main character of that story also appear in several of the stories in Out of the Mountains. In this collection of a dozen stories, characters sometimes reappear in several stories so that the reader sees them at various time points and from different perspectives. However, these are not linked stories. What does connect the stories is a sense of displacement and restlessness – insiders who leave the mountains to live elsewhere and outsiders who come to the mountains. There’s a tension between belonging and not belonging, of insider vs. outsider, of rural vs. urban, of traditional customs vs. new ways.

The cover photograph was taken by my husband, Kevin Scanlon. Both Kevin and I had contributed work to the 2008 “West Virginia Issue” of Hamilton Stone Review which Willis edited. Since Willis was familiar with Kevin’s series of West Virginia photographs, she later requested some of his images for consideration as possible covers for this short story collection. At the time we were curious about why she chose the one she selected, and after reading the stories I now understand how well it fits. These are stories with unexpected juxtapositions and clashes which show the changing culture.

Willis writes, “A great beauty of fiction, of course, is that it can be about many things at once . . . . I consider fiction to be a mutual, human grace – to know people we’ll never meet, beliefs we’ll never hold, experiences we’ll never have in our actual lives. It’s what I read for, and why I write.”

Meredith Sue Willis is the author of sixteen books and she teaches creative writing at New York University, School of Professional and Continuing Studies. She also maintains several blogs: Literature and the Web, Online Journal, as well as Resources for Writers. Two of her books have been published this year: Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel (Montemayor Press) and the short story collection Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories (Ohio University Press).

Upcoming appearances include the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston, West Virginia, October 16th – 17th at the Charleston Civic Center and the Kentucky Book Fair, November 13th.