One of the great things about working with a small indie publisher like Linen Press is that you get a lot more say in the making of your book and that includes the cover.
Generally, if a book is about prison its cover will feature, bars, locks keys, prison windows – you know the tropes! And they sell, there is always that sell with prison.
But I knew Going In With Flowers, was different and that these were images I wanted to avoid at all costs. Fortunately for me, my editor Lynn was in complete agreement… no cliches, no pandering to the market, this was not Orange is the New Black. So how did we chose the cover?
Lynn and I spent many, many, hours (not good for backs and necks etc – all that screen time!) trawling through stock image websites to find the image that would convey the spirit of the collection. We tried abstracts, often used for poetry, and fell briefly in love with one or two, but something seeemed lacking. We swapped links and emails endlessly so that at one stage I have to admit we did flirt with a small, high, prison window that had a bird perched on its sill.
But there was one image we kept returning to – the one you see now – known to us as ‘prison dress,’ because the dress seemed austere, like something that might once have been worn by an inmate, Crucially, there were flowers and a woman’s hands.
The image does not conjure prison or prisoner, although we’ve been very careful to ensure the word prison appears on the cover. There is no desire to mask the subject and its difficult themes or trick the reader in any way.
Flowers are important in this collection, especially in the poetry, where they work as metaphor- often for the women prisoners themselves. I also took flowers into the prison with me, (unusual though that was) to make the world inside more bearable – something reflected in the title poem ( extract below)
Going in with Flowers
Later she went in with flowers, like honey in glass
for the hollow women with little fires in their chest
that refused to be put out, for herself, for the hell
of it, for the green apple stem and earth
and in the darkness there was colour, small strewn flags,
yellow like morning, red for dusk…..
In the end, after the long, demanding, sometimes worrying – will we get it right – process, of deciding on the cover (because a cover feels like such a public statement, and with that comes a good deal of vulnerability)
we discovered we had a new mantra: flowers not bars. Three words which sum up the intentions of the book. And in choosing something we thought beautiful, we felt we’d honoured not stereotyped the women who appear within the pages of Going In With Flowers
