USA Best Book Award, Cover Art and Totems

December 1st:  Headed to Knoxvile to work on the TeamHealth Patient Safety Organization and Leadership Development processes.  Making much progress.  Had an absolutely terrific LEAD course in November teaching leadership and many managerial concepts to our Anesthesiology and Emergency Department facility medical directors.  Next course is in February for our Hospital Medicine directors.

USA Best Book Awards 2013

Am very pleased to note that Widow Walk is a finalist for “Best New Novel” in the 2013 USA Best Book Awards.  This is in addition to the finalist in best historical fiction novel for the 2013 Indie Excellence Awards.

Widow Walk already received “Winner” for the USA Best Book Awards Cover Art. An earlier blog entry shows the steps we took to arrive at our design award.

This news has prompted a substantial increase in the traffic on the web and a dramatic increase in the “Likes” that Widow Walk has received on Facebook, with respondents from several other countries as well as the US.

TOTEMS

I think it is important to discuss the significance of the Widow Walk “Medallion” that we designed for the first edition’s cover  and subsequently incorporated into the second edition’s cover art.  If you look closely at the design, you see a very stylized “totem” composed of five interacting beings.  Randy Mott airbrushed this design so that it would resemble a neatly carved Haida argellite black shale sculpture.  Beautiful work by Randy…giving testimony to the gorgeous work of Haida artists and sculptors.

What and who do the beings represent?  Best to ask you, as a reader, to answer that after you have read the book in its entirety.  However, note that the Raven is interacting with a Wolverine, and the long boat in which they travel is riding over a Beaver.  Flying high over that threesome is a two-headed bird, a Hawk & Dove in one body.  The Hawk/Dove interacts with an Eagle.  The spiritual and behavioral characteristics of each of these symbols are manifest in the main characters of the story.

Totems, incorporating the various animal spirits with which aboriginal people interacted on earth, were extremely important to the Pacific NW aboriginal cultures, and many clans and families up and down the coast kept this form of identification for itself as a proud story-telling differentiation from others.  On Haida Gwai, formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, totems in long abandoned village sites are preserved as national artifacts.  It is unfortunate that the elements have taken their toll.  I wonder what the stories were when they were first carved.  The ghosts in these figures ache to tell what happened to them.

I highly recommend a visit to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology  in Vancouver (www.moa.ubc.ca) for its display of wonderful totem carvings, and another visit to the British Columbia Museum in Vancouver (www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca) to see the examples of Haida argellite art as well as the numerous other displays detailing the tribal and pioneer life in that area.