Designers Statement:
Designers statement- xFor my Book Jacket Project in ENG 200, I decided to make a book jacket for the reading Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty. My main point to is that its about recovery, survival, and finding ones self. The characters face many hard problems like family issues, poverty, addiction, and pain from the past, and the feeling of being lost. But they do not give up. They keep living and moving forward. This idea of “how the living come back to life” is at the heart of the book. Every part of my jacket, the cover art, the synopsis, and the blurbs supports this message. I drew a dark, shady night scene with trees. At the top of the picture I put an arrow, and changed the name to “Night Of The Walking Truth”. I did this because I thought it would fit what I’m arguing and the storyline, which was David traveling to find his lost self and recovering. In the background, there are two Native people walking which represents some points of the reading. I used mostly dark colors like black, dark blue, and gray to make the scene look gloomy. I chose this design because it connects to the book’s title Night of the Living Rez. The dark, shady night shows the difficult and sometimes scary parts of life on the Penobscot reservation. The trees represent the land and nature that are very important to the characters. The two Native people walking in the back show that even in the darkness, the people are still moving. They have not stopped. The arrow at the top stands for the direction or path they are trying to find in life(The right way/Path). By making the cover mostly dark, I wanted to show the pain, trauma, and hard times in the stories. But by showing the two people walking, i argue that the book is not only about suffering. It is also about resilience and survival and recovery. The characters deal with things like addiction and family loss that come from past generations, but they keep going. My picture makes the argument that the past keeps coming back, but the living rez is still alive and still trying to find the way. All pieces of my book jacket work together to make one clear point: Night of the Living Rez is a strong story about survival and resilience on the Penobscot reservation. It shows the heavy weight of trauma and the past that keeps returning. The people walking show hope and movement forward. The synopsis gives the basic story clearly. The blurbs connect the book to Mary Rowlandson’s focus on suffering and Walt Whitman’s celebration of real life. Through this book jacket, I wanted to show what I learned from the texts we studied this semester. The book teaches us that even when life is very hard and full of loss, people still find ways to stay connected to their family, their land, and each other. They keep coming back to life. I felt that this reading was a good choice with us being located in Maine where there is a heavy native presence. The cover and and rest of the jacket are not just a picture, it makes an argument about the main message of the book. The blurbs aren’t just random ones, they show real connections between the authors and their ideas. I believe this jacket fully represents Night of the Living Rez and what we talked about in class about survival, inheritance, and the strength of Native voices. Work Cited: Talty, Morgan. Night of the Living Rez, 2022. Canva, Joncarlos Estrada, “Dark Book Cover/ Night Of The Walking Rez” Canva: Visual Suite for EveryoneCanvahttps://www.canva.com Rowlandson, Mary. “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration” The Concise Health Of American Literature, Vol 1, 2013. Pg247-269. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”The Concise Health Of American Literature, Vol 1, 2013. Pg1490-1521.
