Archive

Tag Archives: The Traveler

I.C.A.D. Day 19 — Snow Globe

June 19, 2015
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

002

In the Spring of 1973 I was full of myself, and full of beans as well. (Not much evolvement on either of those fronts has been made.) I was a student at Glendale Community College and my pal Evan Bishop was that year’s editor of its literary magazine, The Traveler. Evan let me inflict my then-meager illustrative talent on the magazine, and I can only hope that not many copies of that misbegotten edition are floating around still. But one drawing, an illustration for a poem about a melting snowman, did have a crude charm. The lady who wrote the poem was happy enough to say, “THAT’S my Snowman!” So I feel as though I achieved some modest success with illustration, even forty-odd years ago.

Today the phrase “snow globe” evoked memories of that snowman, so I brought him back.

Cover Story: Three Covers, Forty Years

November 15, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Recently my e-mail included an attachment of the cover of SANDCUTTERS, the quarterly publication of the Arizona State Poetry Society. The cover design is by Carol Hogan, and features a ceramic work of mine on the front cover, and a journal page of mine on the back. It looks like this:

sandcutter cover 111514

Naturally I’m thrilled about this. I’m no stranger to literary publication covers, but there have been so few in my artist’s checkered career that I am at most a casual acquaintance. I have designed the covers of two out of three of the chapbooks I’ve self-published. (My old and truest friend Steve Boyle designed the cover of SAVAGE SONNETS AND OTHER WHYS, and I here reward him by not featuring that cover on this post. I am a Stinker.) Here is the cover of my first chapbook:

001

Behind The Bird are thumbnails of some of the 600-odd journal pages I’d done, scanned and posted to the now-defunct website Eons.

To see the one other cover I’d done before then, we have to set the Way-Back Machine all the way to 1973, when I was an 18-year-old pup attending Glendale Community College. That year’s GCC literary magazine, The Traveler, featured my white-on-black portrait of my then-girlfriend. There’s awful clumsiness in the drawing, but there is also love. Here it is, courtesy of GCC’s Memory Project:

traveler cover 111514

Bob Dylan’s line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes to mind: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Forty years of covers and I STILL am on the day shift. [smiles] C’est La Vie–that covers it!