KELLIE WELLS - COMPRESSION SCARS

In 2001 it was my good fortune to win the Flannery O’Connor Prize for my short fiction collection, Compression Scars. I had been sculpting this collection for a number of years, adding new stories, taking out old ones I could no longer bear to read, reordering, revising. Over the years, I’d entered the collection in various contests, and the first version of the collection was a finalist for the Drue Heinz Prize, no cigar, ever the bridesmaid. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has always meant a great deal to me, both as a reader and a writer, so I was especially gratified to win this award (nine years later), to have her name appear on the book next to my own. It had been a long, unglamorous struggle trying to get this book published (the kind that doesn’t make for a particularly inspiring anecdote), and the word that occurs to me to describe my elation at winning this award is pudelwohl, which is German for “happy as a poodle” (a word and sentiment that is neither very German seeming nor O’Connoresque). And there was the added synchronicity of the fact that I was living in Milledgeville, Georgia, at the time, teaching at O’Connor’s alma mater. “Something in the water down there,” said the then director of the prize, Charles East, when he phoned me with the news. The spirit of Flannery O’Connor still permeates Milledgeville—the town is indelibly marked by her stories, her life there—and in moments of hubris I liked to think I’d finally connected with, as a writer, the mystery and manners and alchemy of her genius, her fiction ju-ju.

I could tell you the story of how, at the awards banquet, my blunt, plainspoken German husband managed to charm Flannery O’Connor’s very genteel cousin, a woman who, unlike O’Connor (who said, famously, she didn’t “do pretty”), was always dressed to the nines and neatly coifed and who possessed an exacting sense of propriety you never wanted to find yourself on the admonishing end of, but that wouldn’t provide much general insight into the publication process, so I’ll discuss instead the cover of my book, because that experience seems to me emblematic of the way small presses are different from trade presses.

The design and production manager at the University of Georgia Press, Sandy Hudson, e-mailed me to ask if I had any thoughts about what I’d like to see on the cover, and I was surprised but pleased of course that I was being consulted about this because, well, yes, I was brimming with cover ideas! No doubt an art director’s worst nightmare, but Sandy and Erin Kirk New, the designer, were receptive to hearing me out. I’d heard so many stories from friends and acquaintances who had been unhappy with their book covers and who had had very little say in how their books were designed. I told Sandy I felt a real kinship with the art of Joseph Cornell—could we use an image of one of his boxes? She considered it but couldn’t find one she thought would be an especially good marriage with the book. Instead she suggested that they commission a piece from a local shadow box artist in Athens, and I thought this was a capital idea! They would ask him to read the book and design a box with the stories in mind, construct a sort of visual interpretation. This is the sort of thing I can’t quite imagine a larger house doing, particularly for a first book, a book of short fiction (you’ve probably heard these don’t sell), from an unknown Midwesterner living in a small town in Georgia. Then Sandy asked me if there was any personal image or object I’d like the artist to consider including (again, no shortage of bright ideas), and I sent her a copy of an old photograph, from 1920, of my father and aunt, who were twins and who, at five years old, looked nearly identical. In the picture, they appear starched and uncomfortable in their Sunday duds, and they’re both sporting expressions of longsuffering Midwestern stoicism. I’ve always thought that though this photograph was clearly staged in a studio, the flat-lining lips and wide, expressionless eyes of my father’s face nevertheless betray something essential about him and in that staunchly impassive pokerface you can see the very map of the life that will follow. The reason I thought this would be a fitting image for the book is that the last story I wrote for the collection is about brother and sister conjoined twins, and in this photograph my father and aunt are arranged in such a way that they do look as though they might be attached (yes, I know this is a biological impossibility). The artist, George Davidson, did work the photograph into the box but much more subtly than I’d envisioned; however, I like knowing something about his use of this picture that is almost imperceptible: the photograph appears in a heart frame in the box, and there is one face superimposed over another, my father’s sober mug eclipsing my aunt’s, a familial palimpsest. If you look closely, you can see the line that divides the faces, a slash across the cheek. It makes me think of a dissatisfied artist impulsively expunging from her canvas an image only to find almost the exact same image beneath (a Borges story!). Although otherwise I see no obvious connection between the box’s imagery (the desert? a fishing lure? Frida Kahlo?) and the imagery and themes that run through the collection, I know the artist had, like every reader, his own way into the stories, his own way of making sense of them (the emotional landscape, an ambulatory catfish that appears in one story, perhaps the physical afflictions that characters are assailed by and that determine the shape of their everyday griefs), and I respect that and love the cover art, love that cross pollination between the arts. It’s the sort of arresting assemblage that would make my eye automatically gravitate to the book; regardless of whether the description on the flap or the superlatives used in the blurbs piqued my interest, I’d have to buy it (would that others were so easily taken in!).

So with a university press, you’ll have a modest print run and there won’t be a lot of money for publicity, but chances are you’ll end up with a book you like the look of, a book whose production was carefully and respectfully labored over, and a book that will stay in print, no small perk.


Kellie Wells published the short story collection, Compression Scars, with the University of Georgia Press and in the Spring of 2006, will see her debut novel, Skin, published.  She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.