To Keep the Name Daughter

“I have long admired Monika's work and I respect her aesthetic sensibilities, so when faced with the opportunity to design my first poetry collection, she was the first person I turned to. I had complete faith in Monika's discretion to help me design my book--discretion I very much needed, as I had never before undertaken a project like this. In our first meeting, I provided broad guidelines and expressed general preferences, but I let her know that I was looking to her for expertise and guidance. I would joke that, as a poet, I have a strong sense of how to present myself through language, but I was at a loss when it came to the visual presentation of my work.

 

Monika spent considerable time with my writing, closely reading 30 pages of poems to fully appreciate my voice. This devotion shone through as she talked me through various design element options. For example, as she presented a series of font choices, she first described what my poetry had evoked for her, and then how that experience informed her selection of font options. 

 

Because my work is deeply personal, I wanted to include various family photos in the book. This worked well for the first section, which concerns family and my childhood, but I didn't know what to do with the remaining two sections--one of which dealt with rather dark material (for which photos didn't feel appropriate) and the other, which focused on my adult life. Monika provided a tasteful--subtle but visually striking--solution for the difficult middle section. The photos I considered for the last section seemed disjointed when juxtaposed with the family photos; they had been shot decades apart and had a totally different quality to them. Monika suggested a different path for the photographs of the final section, then she did some brilliant photo editing that brought cohesion to all of the visual elements throughout the book.

 

Had she not told me that this was her first project to design a book, I'd never have suspected it. At every turn, she led our process, thinking of the big picture (what is my "brand" as an artist? what do I want to evoke visually to complement my writing?) and attentive to the smallest detail. We walked through the minutest of tweaks--tiny spacing manipulations to adjust line length, adjustments to stanza breaks and indentations. When weighing how to break a poem across multiple pages, she would patiently make the changes while sharing her screen, so I could see the different options. Once we were completely ready, there were, of course, many particular stipulations from the publisher, some of which required that she go back and reformat the images, adjust the margins, etc. Unaware of these guidelines (or that they might vary from publisher to publisher), I'd failed to inform her of them. Undaunted, she knew exactly how to prep the file, She even logged into my account for me so she could be certain that it uploaded properly and passed the publisher's checklist of requirements.

 

I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with Monika and I cannot convey how absolutely perfect the chapbook is. It isn't just the beautiful finished product, it is the care and creativity, the graciousness, and the openness Monika brought to our collaboration. I cherish the time we spent working together to bring to life a project that is so personal and so dear to me. Work with this woman! She is simply superb.”