Tierney Oberhammer’s debut story collection, Forever Egg, explores love, identity, and the ways our choices reverberate across time. Spanning centuries, its twelve linked stories follow imperfect characters navigating family, desire, loss, and transformation.
Oberhammer is a Hudson Valley-based writer whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Forever Egg will be published by Modern Artist Press on March 2, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Forever Egg, designed by Kimberly Glyder. Below, Oberhammer discusses the search for a tactile design and how eggs and an erupting volcano came to capture the collection’s messy process of becoming.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t have any ideas while working on it, but after I wrote the twelfth story and knew that I had a complete book, I started collecting cover inspiration. This was way before I had a publisher or had even drafted a query letter. I was just dreaming. As I look back at my original cover design inspo, the one thing that’s consistent is that each design depicts something imperfect and tactile, like crumpled paper or a piece of tape or handwritten text or the texture of some medium on rough paper. A great recent example of what I mean is the cover of Jamel Brinkley’s collection Witness; there are fingerprints as if someone has picked up the book and left behind an evidence trail of its realness. I love that, especially in a world where a lot of art is created digitally. All of the characters in Forever Egg are imperfect, and that’s of course what makes them feel real! Madison believes a nose job is going to fix her identity crisis. A kept woman thinks stealing twenty grand worth of diamonds will finally deliver her the security she’s been craving her whole life. Lena can’t look past the end of her baby bump to see how privileged she is as she tears down another mother. They all have issues.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I’m not gonna lie, the design process was tricky and stressed me out. Design and visual aesthetics aren’t my strongest suit. I’ve been really obsessed with seasonal color analysis recently because it’s a style cheat code. Like, you’re telling me there’s something about my undertone and hair-to-skin contrast that can reveal a definitive and objective solution to the problem of what to wear? This is all just to say that I struggled with the design process because I struggle with trusting and articulating my own opinions about visual things. I wasn’t sure what I wanted for the cover (besides something that looked tactile) and then when I saw the first round of ideas, I wasn’t sure which I liked. I even visited a handful of indie bookstores and asked the booksellers which titles were getting picked up on account of their covers (a bit of market research!), but the data there was all over the place. It mostly just seemed like the horror genre was really popular.
The process was me working with my publisher, Kathryn Fay, to provide some general creative direction for the designer, Kimberly Glyder. This was challenging because the possibilities were literally infinite. Where to start?! We started with Jamie, my partner (and a professional photographer), taking a bunch of photographs of farm-fresh chicken eggs in various styles and compositions. The egg photos were gorgeous. Each egg had so much variation in color and texture and shape and size, just like a human! Then we added the idea of a volcano to the mix because a lot of the stories in the book reference an imaginary volcanic island called Saint Anthony. An erupting volcano is a very exciting and active image, so we thought that would bring some movement and drama to the cover. The final design incorporates a print by the artist Lily Kong, who is from Hong Kong and lives in London. Lily’s art is bold and graphic and bright—perfect for a cover. I love her color choices (true winter, anyone?) and I love the texture inherent in her medium. Lily’s volcano is the key to this cover; I’m so grateful she was open to collaborating, and I’m personally pleased to feature a fellow contemporary artist’s work! Once the volcano print was paired with one of Jamie’s egg photographs, the rest went smoothly. I want to shout out both Kathryn and Kimberly for all of their patience while we tweaked. Kimberly did an excellent job composing these elements together and selecting a type that captures both the subtle humor and drama of the collection.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I’d like to say it was some sort of amazing revelation, but the truth is that the process of arriving at a finalized cover was so incremental that by the time I saw the final draft, I already knew how it was going to look. I loved it, but it wasn’t a surprise. I mostly felt relieved that I loved it and wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. This is why I am not a visual artist or a cover designer. I am a writer. Please read my book. If you like the cover, you’ll like it.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Eggs are absolutely iconic. You take an oval and elongate it a bit, and make it pointier at the top and slightly wider at the bottom, and everybody knows it’s an egg. And everybody knows that eggs symbolize origins and inceptions and new beginnings. A crack typically represents a flaw, and that is sometimes the case with an egg, but usually a cracked egg means something is hatching—either a baby bird or a bangin’ breakfast. Eggs represent birth and creation and mothering. And eggs are a moment of teetering potential: the incredible energy and vibrancy contained inside that thin shell contrasts the delicate nature of life at such an early stage. A lot of the stories in Forever Egg are about the process of becoming, and a lot of the characters do it in a messy, broken-egg type of way. And then, of course we have the volcano. It’s my gun on the wall. So, please [spoiler alert]: go ahead and expect a volcano to erupt in this collection!