Over the summer I had to finalize a title and cover for The Big Swim, my climate book which will come out in February, 2015. To me, these decisions must capture the essence of the book and distill it into something true. To the publisher, the cover and title provide the information on which potential book buyers will make their snap decisions about whether to pick the book up and take a closer look.
The book has had several titles. Four years ago, I called the working manuscript The Necessity of Adventure. This title captured the idea that adventures are gates which provide the opportunity to step out of our usual lives and see ourselves and the world more clearly. But the title didn’t capture the ecological inspiration of the book. Yaana Dancer, a poet and novelist in my writing group, came up with Adventures in a World at Risk, which captured the climate change aspect.
Shaena Lambert, who gave my book a bracing substantive edit at a crucial stage, suggested The Big Swim instead. It’s the title of the first chapter about an open-ocean swim as well as the narrative’s overarching metaphor –immersing in the gorgeous complexity of the world and letting it inspire us to act on climate change. I liked it: simple and evocative. So did New Society, my publisher.
But they thought it needed a subtitle to give potential readers more of a clue. I suggested Adventures in a World at Risk. They countered with Coming Ashore in a World Adrift. This didn’t seem as compelling or clear to me: I find adventures are more intriguing than coming ashore and “coming ashore” combined with “a world adrift” seemed a bit flotsam and jetsam.
So I sat down with a glass of scotch and brainstormed thirty new subtitles. My husband Barry helped me select the top five and I sent an email to twenty friends with a request that they rank them. Then I compiled their responses into a spreadsheet. Fourteen people of the twenty found only two worthy of ranking: Adventures in a World at Risk and Coming Ashore in a World Adrift. So much for brainstorm sessions fueled by scotch. The outcome was:
Adventures in a World at Risk: 17 first place votes, 2 second place votes
Coming Ashore in a World Adrift: 3 first place votes, 4 second place votes.
But Shaena Lambert favored Coming Ashore in a World Adrift.
Still, I felt emboldened to explain my hesitations about Coming Ashore to Ingrid at New Society:
To me, the book is more about engaging in the questions than finding solutions, more about the adventure than about coming to shore. Also, regarding whether the world is at risk or adrift, "at risk" pertains to the whole biosphere while "adrift" pertains to human society. For me, it's a book with the biosphere at heart.
Then I attached my survey spreadsheet to the email. And wondered if the people at New Society had understood that the quirky, slightly obsessive protagonist of the book was who they’d have to deal with through all these decisions.
I didn’t hear back. A few days later I sent Ingrid a late vote from another friend which brought the Adventures vote up to 18.
“So, what’s your favourite?” Ingrid wrote back.
“My favorite is The Big Swim, Adventures in a World at Risk because it is truest to the spirit of the book and it would interest me the most as an adventurer. But I have huge respect for Shaena Lambert's sensibility. And from the marketing perspective, I understand that environmental titles aren't supposed to be too scary, and ‘adventure’ combined with ‘at risk’ may deter the timid.”
Then I punted.
“At this point, I'm kind of glad that it is you deciding. I support whatever you think will sell the most books.”
Ingrid responded, “Among marketing folks, there was a very strong aversion to using ‘risk’ at all in the title, and others felt that ashore/adrift carried the metaphor far more strongly…”
And so the stealthier, gentler title won the day.
The next hurdle was the cover. My husband had come up with an image of a woman swimming near a topo map with melting glaciers. I had vague visions of a woman seen a distance swimming in a nautical chart, warm yellows and lovely blues, and a distant glacier.
Also, the marketing survey that New Society had me complete came back in the form of catalog copy. I wasn’t happy with it and spent a lot of time revising it. New Society responded that my revisions didn’t meet the required format. So I reworked the revisions into the required format.
In addition, there were copy edits to be made. I expected my editing process to be one of the intimate, intellectual give and take sessions for which authors pledge undying gratitude to their editors in their acknowledgements. Instead, New Society contracted the manuscript to a copy editor who gave a thorough and deferential edit which took only a few hours to review. Once I got over my surprise, I realized that The Big Swim had already received that intimate, intellectual substantive edit from Shaena Lambert and it was to her that I would pledge my undying gratitude.
During this time, we were settling back into our Cortes Island home, going through pretty much every item we own and deciding if it deserved a place in our newer, much smaller house and battling an infestation of moths in our stored woolens. Every afternoon, I rode my bike to the lake for a good, long swim.
Cortes Island has two central lakes, Hague and Gunflint, where just about everyone who lives on or visits the island swims and plays. The lakes had unprecedented algae blooms in the spring, complete with orange scum and the smell of dead fish. When I went swimming in July, there was a weird blob of white about a meter down that looked like cirrus clouds.
I’ve swum these lakes for twenty years. If I averaged 60 swims each year, that’s 1,200 swims, many of them well over a mile. All that lake time is blurred into one long, blissful moment: the clear greenish water shafted with light, my rhythmic breath amplified by the water, the trail of bubbles from my fingertips, the water’s gentle hold. Every time, I’ve emerged feeling like a better person: cooler, more collected, happier.
This summer, I did my best to ignore the creepy algae cloud. But it made me feel miserable. So I came up to speed on lake biology and devised a fundraiser idea for the Friends of Cortes Island, the local environmental group that was arranging testing and looking into solutions.
Predictably, it was another “big swim”: to swim all nine lakes on the island in one day, almost 10 K of swimming with some daunting hiking and boating logistics thrown in. I would get together a team and people could sponsor us. The Nine Lake Swim would be a rallying point for raising money to test the lakes and find solutions. The team of four came together pretty quickly, once people realized I seriously thought the swim could be done. We started training swims and figuring out boats, cars and trails.
The activity helped me cope with climate change writ small upon our island. The algae blooms in the lakes every spring, but under certain conditions it can really take off and, due to climate change, those conditions are increasingly likely to occur. In a common metaphor, climate change has loaded the dice.
The summer was also marked by the dearth of purple starfish, the result of a wasting disease probably linked to climate change. For years, I had laughed at visitors who proudly sent us pictures of the purple starfish. To me, they were like daisies, nice but too prolific to be special. Now it was like the daisies stopped blooming. It’s hard for me to take these changes in. I need something positive to do in response.
In early August, New Society sent versions of the proposed cover. The friends I polled thought were great. Except Shaena. And some part of me held back as well. I went back and forth with New Society Publishers about color and being too literal about swimming. I began to suspect that their game was to do what I asked and show both versions to the marketers who would of course prefer their version. Not that this is an entirely bad thing because they are the experts. But that would make my input an empty exercise.
Also, the catalog copy writers, or rather the marketers, didn’t like my reworked versions of the catalog copy as well as their originals.
It was just a few days before the Nine Lake Swim. The boat we needed for the northern lakes wasn’t working. One of the swimmers had an injured foot. Another had a sore shoulder. I had a stomach bug and lost my appetite even while ravenously hungry from all the training swims. The lakes were getting colder by the day. It seemed like everything could easily fall apart.
The catalog copy issue was one thing too many. I read both versions over again and, this time around, didn’t see why mine was so much better. I asked for one change: that the lesson of the ancient jaw bone in one of the stories be appreciation rather than patience. “I’m still learning patience,” I wrote. “Aren’t we all?” the catalog copy writer responded.
So that was settled. The Nine Lake swim boat started working again. The shoulder pain subsided, the foot injury didn’t matter after all, my stomach settled down and everything was back in swing.
And we did it. On August 24, we swam the litany of nine lovely Cortes Island lakes, each one a story in itself. We swam into the rising sun at Cork, the wildest lake. We swam into the setting sun at Hague, the one in the center of community.
As the four of us swam together toward the sandy beach park, the sun dazzled my eyes. The time went slow, as it does while doing one small thing over and over until it adds up. Once in the shade, I saw about fifty people in a line along the beach and heard the beat of a drum in the rhythm of our arm strokes. Everything fused into a long moment of perfection: all the lakes we had been in, each one so different and beautiful; the people who had fed and encouraged us along the way; the happiness of our team; the joy of swimming; and the community who awaited us with food and appreciation.
We raised over $13,000 to test for nutrient sources to the lakes and implement solutions. Hopefully we contributed to a positive foundation for our community’s response to other symptoms of a changing climate as well.
The event further linked swimming and climate change for me. The Big Swim is my story of coming to terms with climate change. The Nine Lake swim became a new, unwritten chapter, a next step in terms of taking steps in synch with my community.
But I don’t intend to become caught up in responding to the consequences of climate change to the exclusion of acting on the causes. As the consequences build, we will be forced to focus on adaptation, like decreasing the nutrients in the lake. But even more important is making political and personal choices that reduce carbon emissions. We have so little time. In Canada, the boreal forests are burning at a historic rate in one of the dreaded climatic feedback loops. A climate-active federal government in 2015 has enormous implications for Canadians and the world.
Regarding the book, New Society sent a cover in the colors I asked for. It was lovely and if it wasn’t 100% what I had hoped for, that was because I couldn’t exactly picture that myself. I let go of the literal truth that I never do breast stroke or swim in water that looks that cold. The cover captured the metaphor, as I had asked for. When the designer sent a slightly different version which settled an aesthetic concern for her, this bit of care brought it even more into focus: a woman swimming toward a glacier that melts into a nautical chart. She projects alertness to what is happening to the world.