Extravagent Visions: Kristopher K. Orr Weaves the Auralia Thread

Today’s post comes to you courtesy of Jeffrey Overstreet, author of the Auralia Thread series including Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, and Raven’s Ladder.

Tomorrow I’ll have a review of Auralia’s Colors posted. With that note, I give the floor to Mr. Overstreet, who I thank very much for being here today…

GO AHEAD: JUDGE THESE BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS

The story of how Auralia’s Colors came to be published is more implausible and bizarre than any fantasy I’ve made up.

This week, I stood in my neighborhood Barnes and Noble staring at a bookshelf in disbelief and gratitude. There sit three volumes of my series—The Auralia Thread—lined up between the works of Naomi Novick and Philip Pullman. It’s even harder to imagine that the fourth and final “strand” of The Auralia Thread will join them there in 2011, completing an epic saga I first imagined more than a decade ago.

The journey from inspiration to publication has been full of surprises. I’ve shared some of those surprises in other articles and interviews, and in this old post at LookingCloser.org.

Rather than repeat a story I’ve shared elsewhere, I thought I’d tell you about one of the biggest and best surprises: the extraordinary cover art for The Auralia Thread, designed by Kristopher K. Orr and some of his colleagues.

FRUIT LOOPS, BLOODSHED, AND CLEAVAGE

Growing up, I dreamed of following in the footsteps of my heroes — J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Madeleine L’Engle, and Lloyd Alexander. But those dreams would sometimes turn to nightmares when new editions of their work would arrive on bookshelves bearing dreadful cover illustrations.

Did nobody care about the art on these book covers? Didn’t publishers want to find cover artists who knew the story, the style, the characters, and the worlds they explored?

I have a dog-eared copy of The Fellowship of the Ring in my library that I keep just for laughs. The cover bears an illustration of a tree, and the branches are bearing some kind of ugly fruit with eyes. Demon apples with eyes!

Why?

I have read The Lord of the Rings dozens of times. And I have come to the conclusion that either the picture represents what Hobbits envision after eating too many muschrooms or smoking too much pipeweed, or the artist was partaking of some powerful fungus while working. That fruit-loopy image tells you nothing about the story.

As this was one of the earliest paperback editions of Tolkien’s Fellowship, I can’t help but wonder if the bizarre cover art didn’t contribute to the trilogy’s success. Did the covers set readers’ expectations so low that their experience of the magnificent adventure inside was amplified?

Take a stroll through the fantasy literature section of your nearest bookstore. If you’re like me, you’ll cringe. For every great book cover, it seems there are three or four that seem desperate for attention, pandering to our basest appetites. It’s like an art gallery of the cheesy, the lurid, the grotesque, the painfully derivative, and the weapons upon which people can impale themselves.

Covers like these have a lot to do with why many readers I’ve met still refuse to take fantasy seriously. They avoid the Science Fiction/Fantasy section as if it were the territory of adults stuck in some prolonged adolescence. They presume that there is no serious literature there. Who can blame them, when book covers so often look like an S&M fashion show? Apparently fantasy readers are primarily interested in sharp weaponry and cleavage.

Maybe that stuff turns you on, but it’s not what drew me to read and write fantasy.

I’m interested in fantasy stories because I want to immerse myself in a world so interesting, beautiful, surprising, and mysterious that I forget all about the pressures and problems of my day-to-day life.

Moreover, I’m interested because the best fantasy stories send me back to my daily responsibilities with a greater sense of the world’s mystery. They give me a stronger sense of purpose. They inspire me with visions of hope and grace for this world beyond the capacities of self-destructive human beings. And they strengthen my conviction that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

A COLORLESS KINGDOM AND KRISTOPHER ORR

So, as I worked on Auralia’s Colors from 1996 to 2004, developing the story for the sheer pleasure of exploring a new world on paper, without any expectation of publication, I often played around with ideas for cover art.

Those pictures often depicted the title character.

Auralia first stepped into my mind’s eye as I was hiking through the extraordinary beauty of the trees around Flathead Lake in Montana. Drunk on the colors of the woods, I imagined stumbling onto a colorless kingdom in the middle of it.

And then I realized I was looking over the shoulder of an artist whose heart was broken by what she saw. She determined to go there, to try and make a difference. And what happened to her there would be as great and terrible as an earthquake.

She turned out to be a 16-year-old girl named Auralia. Auralia lives in the forest, where she creates enchanting — and enchanted — artwork. Her inventions reveal colors that nobody in her world has ever seen before. She’s drawn to the kingdom of House Abascar, where the people are suffering because their creative expression and colors have become quite illegal.

I knew that if the story ever were published, it would pose challenges to the cover artist. How does one paint colors that nobody has ever seen before?

In my more cynical moments, I concluded that the artist would probably take my quiet, mysterious girl, pump up her bosoms like balloons, and clothe her in slinky costume, transforming her from Auralia to Barbarella… or, perhaps, Barba-ralia.

When a whirlwind of outlandish events brought about the publication of Auralia’s Colors, WaterBrook Press generously agreed to let me participate in preliminary discussions about the cover art. Since they were willing to take a chance on me, I determined to accept whatever direction they wanted to go. But I hoped the result would convey something of beauty, mystery, and danger I felt in Auralia’s world.

The nightmares of Demon Fruit returned.

On the first week of January in 2007, I received an image file from an artist at WaterBrook Press named Kristopher K. Orr. He asked me if I would take a look at his first concept for the cover of Auralia’s Colors.

I was terrified. I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I got up and paced around my office. I went for a cup of coffee. Then I came back, took a deep breath, braced myself, summoned all of my capacity for kindness, and opened the file.

Oh.

I stood up. I shouted, “Oh-ho!!”

I think I said a spontaneous prayer of gratitude.

Not only had Kristopher captured the sense of eerie mystery that I felt looking out at House Abascar, but he had given me the very character I had imagined. That girl wrapped in cloak made from the forest’s own elements? Auralia. No doubt about it. She seemed solitary and a little sad. She was staring into the distance at House Abascar, the very colorless kingdom I’d imagined. The shadows around her spoke of peril and danger.

And there wasn’t a single piece of Demon Fruit hanging in the trees.

If this had been a movie poster for some upcoming feature, I would have immediately made plans to be there on opening day.

The nightmares about trees full of Demon Fruit came to an end.

JUDGING SEQUELS BY THEIR COVERS

Since then, I have received letter after letter, email after email, from readers who have said that they picked up Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight because they found the covers so intriguing.

And I’ve had many conversations with Kristopher. He’s collaborated with artists like Kelly L. Howard and Mike Heath on covers for Cyndere’s Midnight and Raven’s Ladder. The results have been extraordinary.

Cyndere’s Midnight has a cover that captures the heart of the story — a faint glimmer of hope in a dark, icy forest. A young widow is mourning beside a mysterious well. The water is warm, even in the dead of winter.  From between the stones of the well, springtime seems to emerge in the form of blue flowers on coiling green stems. The widow looks up, as if she senses someone approaching. And behind her, there is a serious darkness.

Those who read the story will know what’s in that darkness. Cyndere’s Midnight has its roots in the tradition of Beauty and the Beast tales. And there’s a beast concealed there, watching.

Now, Raven’s Ladder is turning heads, through no magic of my own, but by the powerful imaginations of Kristopher Orr and Mike Heath.

WEAVING THE AURALIA THREAD

If only every author could be lucky enough to work with such inspired artists.

To represent The Auralia Thread, pictures of battle scenes or buxom women in leather straps would not have been fair to the bookstore browser, nor would they have been fair to the narrative. Violent and bloody episodes do occur in The Auralia Thread, but they don’t represent the heart of the story. Scenes emphasizing sexual allure would have trivialized the characters and made far too small a promise about the story.

I want readers to open the book in the hopes that they’ll go somewhere beautiful, explore something mysterious, and make unforgettable discoveries. I want them to expect something grand. I will do my best to deliver that experience, and I’m learning as I go. But I know that even the greatest adventure might go unnoticed if a book does not leap off the shelf and grab a reader’s attention.

I don’t know what you’ll think of The Auralia Thread. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I have. But I’m almost certain you’ll enjoy the cover art.

I have an enormous Auralia’s Colors print on my wall, and once in a while it frustrates me. I want to step through the frame… and live there.