I had in mind a little chapbook to celebrate my 65th birthday. I’d written an essay about a fall trip to Ukraine in search of my grandfather. I thought I’d just design the text in my version of Word (LibreOffice), print it on my new-ish laser printer, sew the pages, and voila! But it turned into something a little more complicated. My wonderful friend Anik offered to take over the design (after several panic-filled emails from me to her in the Netherlands, re: the capriciousness of my word-processing programme), my husband offered to print the cover labels, title page, and colophon, my son sourced a beautiful old map of my grandfather’s region in Ukraine and turned a section of it into a file that could be printed as endpapers. My printer didn’t want to print Anik’s text. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine. But luckily there’s an excellent graphic arts place in Sechelt and the woman there printed the text and maps. The cover stock we intended to use was just a shade too narrow. Luckily (again) we have something else that will work. Yesterday I chose some decorative ding bats to use on the cover labels to suggest old-fashioned museum cards. There ended up being more pieces to this simple plan than I’d imagined but they are now coming together. John just brought in the proof of the title page and colophon, I have some gorgeous marbled paper for bookmarks, and the boxes of text are on the dining table, waiting to be folded. Folded, smoothed, glued, sewn: winter piecework, in early February.
...Theresa Kishkan 