Interpretation of Poem

“Morning in the Burned House”, by Margaret Atwood, was a fascinating poem to interpret. After reading the poem through several times, I decided that was sad, in a reflective way. The narrator seems to be a young child, one who has perished in a house fire. This child seems confused, and may not notice that it is dead, as it focuses on images of their house before the fire. I wanted to take the same perspective of the narrator when creating my book. I did this by focusing on the vivid imagery that is described. The scenes and objects described are obviously drawn from memories, before the fire. Therefore, I decided to portray the images as they would have been before being destroyed. However, it is obvious that, whether the narrator wants to admit it or not, everything in the house is destroyed. Accordingly, I wanted to remind the reader that these scenes have been touched by fire. I accomplished this by burning the edges of the pages. In addition, I also physically distressed the pages with powers, inks, and razor blades, to make the book seem as though it was aged, and an actual relic from the fire. Most of the images were drawn by hand, scanned into the computer, and traced with the pen tool in Illustrator. I used a charcoal brush setting to make the images appear as if they were painted on the page by hand. I also bound the book with two pieces of painted cardboard and strips of twine. The typeface I used was "typewriter new roman," a typewriter font that I found online. I used this font because, again, I wanted the book to seem old, as though it was from an earlier time period.

Project 3: Finished Poem Book

Here are some photographs of my book. They're not of the greatest quality, but I didn't want to post only the Illustrator images because I did so much to each page after printing. You have to view the pictures from bottom to top.