Tree Abraham on Designing Sarahland
Tree Abraham is a book designer, illustrator, writer, & maker of things. Here she takes us through her process for designing Sam Cohen’s Sarahland.
Sam Cohen’s debut short story collection, Sarahland, is a psychedelic plunge into the lives of characters called Sarah. We meet each Sarah at the battle line between their nebulous identity and the traditional roles society has set forth. There’s a story set in a Chinatown strip mall’s velvet painting museum, another in Ancient Egypt, another in a Midwestern college dorm. These genre-bending stories are superficially disparate, but bound in their attempt to relinquish confines imposed on the inner self and its relationship to the outer world. It’s a modern mythology.
So many books I work on are free of substantial iconography, with editors requesting the cover feature “a woman” or “a landscape” in the absence of something distinctive. In contrast, Cohen has a gift for staging heavy emotional topics in dreamlike scenes, both feeding into one another and creating a whimsical host of meaningful visuals to build upon.
In the initial brief, I was told COOL. GENDER NON-CONFORMING. PINK, but with a twist. But still, PINK. Some notes after reading the manuscript:
I tried options that felt candy-coated but connoting symbols of sexual energy from the stories. One Sarah sits in a bubblegum pink 50’s merry-widow on a Victorian fainting couch (in a brothel-like house). One Sarah speaks of superpowers gained by fusing gemstones together (during lesbian sex).
The team was excited, but I think the author felt that they could be misinterpreted as trapped in girlhood rather than escaping girlhood trappings. There was something reductive about pairing pink with a static object.
Cohen was excellent at articulating her vision. She made mood boards, suggested illustrators, and wrote succinct opinions about each design I shared. The cover needed to feel evolutionary and organic. Some notes from the new feedback:
I spent a long-time researching relevant imagery. I was overwhelmed with visuals though struggling to depict a mythical ecology. I pitched illustrators and collagists like Paige Mehrer, Katie Scott, Yu-Hsuan Wang, and Ayala Tal that seemed to veer into this territory, as well as sculptural works by Angelika Arendt and Amy Gross.
I showed covers that sampled these artists as well as making my own attempts. Repetition had been suggested as a graphic device to echo the multiple stories of Sarah, but who also serve as stand-ins for the endless reinventions of the self that anyone might pursue.
As the book progresses, Sarahs become more amorphous. There’s a story where a woman becomes a tree. Dolphins are mentioned a few times, embodying a character’s desire to transcend gender and land to become permeable.
The final cover descends like the arch of the book from the human, to hybrid ecology, to the sea. Whether or not the reader is grappling with a queer identity, their body, or the society encasing them, Sarahland’s themes have universal resonance. It encapsulates that anxious desperation to be liberated—from who we are told we are, from ecological collapse, and from the capitalist delusion that any of it is isolated from a whole.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.