The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain – the story behind the cover

Here, Judy Darley tells us about the story behind the beautiful cover of her short fiction collection The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain.

Since signing my contract with Reflex Press, I must have painted a dozen mountains. I work in a fairly visual way as a writer, watching the scenes in my head as I write them. I also have a sort of synesthesia that means I see colours in the individual words. Often, the editing process is me trying to make the sentences look as beautiful as I can, with all the colours shining together, even though I know I’m the only person who views them that way.

With this collection, and particularly the title, the overriding shade was a glimmering turquoise with splashes of indigo and titanium-white. The title itself sprang from one of the collection’s micro tales, ‘Family Psychology’. It’s a story I love because it encapsulates one of my favourite childhood games played with my sister on rainy days. We would transform our home into the whole world and have remarkable adventures. I remember the thrill and fear of scrambling from one piece of furniture to another so the ravenous creatures beneath couldn’t eat us! We used skipping ropes to scale the stairs, aka the mountain, and then had to brave the jungle bathroom where radiator-heated towels lurked, ready to crush us in their embrace. My heart still races with the joy of that game, of being able to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.

It’s a theme that runs throughout this collection, where what we perceive is not always what’s there and what’s real is no more than a point of view. I think the first lockdown shrank our worlds so small that people who’d previously described themselves as uncreative found their imaginations a vital respite from the monotony of the same walls, same faces and same scenery day after day.

My collection gave me a happy focus in this difficult time so that every morning I could escape on different mini-adventures simply by typing and dreaming. I rediscovered old stories and created new ones that filled hours with vivid colours and possibilities. I wrote of connections and explored ideas, revisited favourite haunts and dreamt up places and characters that kept me entertained, intrigued and, in some cases, challenged. When I missed people or worried about them, I sought fictional solutions as a form of comfort.

Beyond it all, a mountain shimmered in shades of blue, green and purple, and that became the painting that is now the collection’s cover. It reminded me both that there’s always a way forward and that if you try hard enough, it’s possible to turn your world into anything you can imagine.

‘Family Psychology’ by Judy Darley

Some homeschool days, the lounge is a sea, stairs a snowcapped mountain, bathroom a jungle, Mum and Dad’s bedroom a sun-seared dessert. You list dessert creatures: ‘Chocolate-tailed chuckwalla, jammy gerbil, custard vulture, sugar-swirl rattlesnake…’

The lounge thrashes with child-hungry squirms. Upstairs, bone-crunching jungle towels writhe. You save me when the dessert duvet gums me into sinking sand.

You’ve set your sights on the uncharted territory of the roof, aka the moon.

I waver behind curtains. When you return – narrow-mouthed, blank-eyed – I grasp your arm, but my fingers pass through. My brother, adrift beyond our realm.

My turn to rescue.

The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain by Judy Darley is available from our online bookshop.