When fireflies dance from the open wound of your mouth. When you have talked graves free of their bones, dug wasps from their homes. Stung truth with a raw tooth. When grief has bitten your hand for feeding it the names of the lost. When you have found a secret garden within the reckless brambles of your heart, where the silence deepens until trees wail by comparison.

– excerpt from ‘Break in Case of Silence’, by Zachary Kluckman

As a designer of book covers, there are many key moments during the process, starting from the first email offering a commission, to the point when you have the finished book in your hand. That moment when the courier drops off the heavy cardboard box, the parcel tape is slit through, the crumpled paper stuffing is bundled aside and then – there are the books. And there is your front cover staring up at you in rows of fours and sixes. That moment is a blend of excitement and terror; what if something has gone wrong between finally letting go of the design, and hitting ‘send’ – and the printer at the presses hitting ‘print’?

What if there’s a rogue overprint in there? What if I’ve fumbled my keyboard at the last moment and inserted a typo? Thankfully – usually (but not always) – the book cover will print pretty much as I would have hoped.

Any designer will confirm that what you see on your screen is often quite far removed from what appears on the book when that printed copy finally arrives. I’ve always had a tendency to go dark with my artwork, it’s just always been my thing: moody, shadowy, detail obscured in gloom. In publishing though, that can present problems, especially for book covers. I would hope, though, that the publisher who trusts me to front up their book knows what to expect of me. When I’m given the freedom to create, I will tend towards the darker end of the spectrum.

I’ve been fortunate enough in the past few years to have been asked by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) to design covers for their annual New Writing Scotland collection, which is always a joy to work on. Duncan Jones and the editors will provide a poem which has inspired the title of that year’s collection, and I’m then given the choice either to use it directly as inspiration or to do completely my own thing. For an artist that’s a real gift, as you can’t really ask for more space for freedom of expression than that. So, on reading the poem ‘Break in Case of Silence’, by Zachary Kluckman, which centres on death and grief, I found myself inspired straight away. I often find that the final piece of art I produce for a cover will not have deviated too far from my first thumbnail sketch. Again, this was the case, although maybe that says more about my lack of flexibility than my driven sense of purpose. By a weird serendipity the very morning of the day I was commissioned by ASLS, I woke to find a young rabbit laying on its side, dead, on my kitchen floor. A lovely wee thing, its head was slightly bloodied. Cursing my cat (for he it was who was responsible), I stopped to photograph the rabbit for some kind of odd posterity – little realising that I would be incorporating it into a book cover before long. Also coincidentally, the imagery of nature that Kluckman had used in his poem was already in my head. For some weeks I had been at work on my second children’s picture book, which is a story about gardening, nature, growing your own veg and occasionally letting things stay a little wild. My head was full of nettles and brambles. For this cover I saw a night scene: a rabbit lying dead in long grass, under a thicket of thorns. There’s a sprig of forget-me-not. And a tiny prick of light reflected in its eye from the hidden glow of a firefly behind a leaf. I had been out in my garden the night before, snapping some pics of a string of lights which was gradually becoming smothered in bindweed. Again, this felt like some kind of mirroring of the fireflies in the poem.

More than these surface similarities, though, the theme of grief and death had struck a chord with me. That spring in Glasgow, the publishing community was in a state of sadness over the disappearance of Brian Hamill, publisher and creator of The Common Breath. Brian had been missing for two weeks, amid reports of a young man seen (in the blandest code) ‘entering the river Clyde’. Our fears were realised when at length a body was recovered from the water. Expressions of grief and shock began to appear on social media from his fellow professionals, followed by tributes to Brian’s personality, hard work and passion for the written word. His desire had been to rediscover forgotten or obscure writers and give them a fresh lease of life, and in parallel to give the many talented but unheard voices in poetry and prose a forum to be read. His 2020 collection The Middle of a Sentence was received by the contributors and readers with such enthusiasm that it felt almost like an awkward omission that there were not already more such opportunities for new voices to be heard. It took a young man in his spare time, using his passion and dedication to the written word, to bring together the new and unpolished with some more weel-kent names, into a single book. At the time of its publication Brian was overwhelmed with requests for copies and went swiftly to reprint.

I’d had the good fortune to be invited to create covers for The Common Breath since its first publication Good Listeners, co-authored by Brian and Alan Warner. I had met Brian in person only once, years before, at a book launch for Vagabond Voices. In all the intervening time he had kept me in mind as a cover designer and with The Common Breath up and running he was finally in a position where he could commission me. Up to and throughout the period of lockdown we collaborated on a further four covers. He was generous to me with his praise, encouragement and ideas, as I’m sure he was to his written-word contributors. He was humble in his requests for changes or artistic suggestions, and self-deprecating almost to a fault. I found that he would judge his own contributions harshly which, in retrospect, makes me a little sad that he perhaps didn’t realise just how appreciated he was. Our communication was such that I counted him as more than just a colleague. Indeed, his typical sign-off was ‘my friend’ and I had been looking forward to getting together again, post-lockdown, when we could have met up in person in Glasgow for a cup of tea and a proper blether. I know that we’d have got along famously. What a legacy he has left behind — not just the handful of wonderful titles TCB has published, but a genuine void in a community, and grief in a widely scattered group of creatives. Plus an underlining of the fact that there is a real desire for further forums where unheard, uncovered or forgotten voices can be read – or read again.

In reading the tributes of the publishing community, I recognised the same traits in their relationships with Brian as in mine: ‘I got to know him via email during lockdown’ … ‘I was really looking forward to meeting up’ … ‘I felt that he was my friend’ … ‘I had no idea what he had been feeling’. It had got so close to that point of being able to meet up, when the news came through about Brian’s disappearance. It was a profound shock, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I had no knowledge of his real life situation, or about what may have been weighing him down. Nor was it for me to speculate. It’s unfortunate that concerning suicide, a common reaction from colleagues and friends is: ‘I had no idea.’

2020 had been a busy time for The Common Breath and in January I had just completed the cover for All to Blazes by New Zealander Frank Sargeson – a collection by another under-appreciated voice in literature. Brian and I had arrived at an image of a New Zealand ‘bach’ – or beach hut – still inhabited but with an air of abandonment and solitude; bound at the rear by trees and to the foreground by a sea of dry grasses. In many ways I felt a familiar muscle memory of this drawing as I created the artwork for Break in Case of Silence. It felt like a sombre echo of that earlier illustration: of loneliness, darkness and the passing away of a life. I worried a little not only about the physical gloominess of the drawing, but the darkness of the imagery itself. In creating it, I realised that I wanted this to be a kind of personal tribute to my friend, but I had also to remain true to the commission. ASLS were as generous as always, and enthusiastic for the cover despite my misgivings of details that might be lost under a matte laminate. I think too that Brian would have reacted favourably to it and said kind things, as, more often than not, he did. If not quite dedicated to him, this artwork was done in his memory. I hope that is fitting – ASLS and The Common Breath both share that common purpose or bringing new talent into the light.

Break in Case of Silence Editors: Rachelle Atalla, Marjorie Lotfi and Maggie Rabatski (Gaelic). Published July 26th 2021, avialable to pre-order here.

Please donate to the GoFundMe in honour of Brian Hamill, to buy a memorial bench, raise money for men's health charities, and to support The Common Breath.