Blog
Cover Story with Tyler Pennock and Ovila Mailhot
Around 2006, after receiving my adoption registration records from the Albertan government, I started immediately looking for folks with the last name Mailhot on Facebook. I found Ovila and started messaging him there, asking if he knew my biological mother Linda.
I remember he pointed out that I was Facebook friends with his Auntie, Lee Maracle, who was my teacher then at the University of Toronto.
Several months later, we figured out that we were related — Ovila’s father was my oldest Uncle! After that, we became online friends and then met for the first time in 2016 at his home on Seabird Island.
One thing I remember well: We were both in our twenties, that period when you’re not fully grown into your adult faces and wrinkles haven’t yet defined the uniqueness of you. A few folks I’d shown his pictures to thought I was showing pictures of myself. I remember messaging Ovila to tell him afterwards! We still have similar smiles and gestures, the likenesses of which a lot of adoptees talk about in their journeys of rediscovery.
Here’s my conversation with Ovila Mailhot, the cover designer of my three books of poetry Bones, Blood, and Skin.
Ovila Mailhot: Bones is the first cover I did for Tyler. It’s probably my favorite of the three covers. I took it as a book of winter poems. His first few lines were, “Under the moonlight, the softness that night gives us — the earth rising to meet in snow, or the glow of trilliums where there is enough sound in a breath.”
I had a spiritual connection to the wolf [in Bones], which is why I added that. Later I found out that Tyler did as well. So it was meant to be, I suppose.
Tyler Pennock: I remember I teared up when Ovila sent me the first proofs — I hadn’t mentioned the wolf, but to see one on the cover just made the whole project feel right.
Ovila: Tyler always had a bit of an idea or vision for what he’d like to see, sometimes just a word, and I’d be able to run with that and experiment with my own creativity.
The second cover was Blood. Tyler mentioned a type of bird (I forgot the name of the bird lol) he’d see in the early mornings. His first poem captured that: early dawn, a meeting of birds. I was a bit more nervous designing this book cover.
On Bones, my Coast Salish art form was very subtle, but Tyler has always encouraged my creativity and work, so I leaned fully on my Salish art expression. Birds are my favorite to design in my Coast Salish style, so I loved the way it turned out in the end. I found a way to express my own voice while still honoring Tyler’s vision for his book and poems. It was perfect.
Tyler: OMG yes! I remember that conversation. The book was finished during the pandemic. I was alone at the time and would walk toward the harbourfront [in Toronto]. There is this copse of trees, which runs from Queen’s Quay to the water, and there must have been hundreds of birds there in the morning, and at night, singing their hearts out. I may even have sent Ovi a video of it — it was wild!
The bird itself was a Grey Jay, what some folks call a Whiskeyjack up here. They’re neat; they know humans well enough to request food from us and will eat from someone’s hands.
Spring and morning were big aspects in this book, and I really liked what Ovila had done with the sunrise image. The red was my focus — that thin line of red as the sun approaches in the morning, but before you see it. I think I sent pictures of the sunrise from my apartment window, too.
Ovila: Skin was the third cover, the last book of the trilogy. I happened to be experimenting with new styles in my art right around the time Tyler asked me to design the cover. So, I was excited to share that in this cover.
My goal was to push the creative boundaries of Skin’s design. Different shades of color, thinking of an elder’s teaching that we’re all in the same canoe together, connected as one, regardless of race or skin color. And thinking about Tyler’s first lines in the book, “intimacy isn’t a definite discreet thing — it is a pattern, an instinct. As unique to the weaver as the place they occupy.”
“What became clear to me throughout these projects was that I never had to worry about what Ovila came up with. I had confidence it would relate or work somehow.”
Tyler: Before approaching Ovila to ask him to design Skin’s cover (like I wasn’t going to, ha!), I thought about the opening poems, the one about spiders’ weaving, followed by the poem, “Paper.” I saw a kind of relationship between how a spider weaves their web (as individuals and as unique species). Throughout the book, I was concerned about the concept of land, how we are unique expressions of a unique territory, just as a spider’s web are unique expressions of their territory, their relationships. Like the paper on which they write their experience and their land. I love how quickly Ovila captured that in his first attempt of the cover.
Ovila: Some of those key words, such as “pattern” and “weaver,” really got my creativity flowing for the cover design. Patterns and weaving play a huge part in our Coast Salish culture and art form. This allowed the design process to unfold seamlessly and organically. I added Salish elements and an eagle head within the weave design. To us, an eagle seen in the sky is a blessing from the Creator. I wanted Tyler and this book to receive all the blessings deserved.
Tyler: What became clear to me throughout these projects was that I never had to worry about what Ovila came up with. I had confidence it would relate or work somehow.
Maybe it’s because we’re older, or because it’s been about ten years since we met in person, but that [natural collaboration] makes so much sense now. That relationality — the medicines we share — grew into their own thing. To me, it’s like how winter leads to summer, that what’s there before lends a texture to the things that come afterward.
I remember the first conversation we had on social media around 2007. I was looking for my mom, and you remarked that I knew your Auntie. I think now about how our connection grew out of shared connections [and translated] to a unique creativity seen in and on these books.
Ovila: This trilogy is a special project because the covers are related to their fixation in the body: bones, blood, and skin. [And I agree with Tyler that] our collaboration is one of relationality. As my cousin and I found each other, we were bonded by our expression of art, our medicine.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
About the Author
Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones (Brick Books), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto.
About the Designer
Originally from Seabird Island, B.C., Ovila Mailhot is a self-taught artist with roots in Nlaka’pamux and Sto:lo Nation. He has always wanted to represent where he’s from in his culture and community. Learning more about the ancestral elements of Coast Salish art helped him find ways to show who he is and where he’s from. Art feels vital to him. And being able to share that passion is important to him. This tradition of work and this beauty are so necessary for our culture and healing.
