“Everything is Far From Here” by Christina Henriquez

I selected this story because it spoke to me the most. I think immigration and the tribulations immigrants go through just to get to the United States is very important to discuss. Far too often people gloss over the hardships that immigrants experience, especially immigrant women. This story made the reader attached to one woman and her experience while she waits in a detention center, alone and separated from her child. I think one thing that this story did really well was immerse oneself in the mind of the woman. You can easily follow as her hope rises and falls, as does her hold on reality. I feel like sometimes it can be difficult to show grief and mental decline like that in a way that is believable and respectful, but this tory excelled at it. Also, the prose in this story really stuck with me. Every so often we were hit with a very powerful line that was bursting with feelings and emotions and thoughts and beliefs. I chose the lines that I did because I didn’t stop thinking about them after reading the story for the first time. Those lines really left an imprint in my brain.

I knew I wanted to keep the book simple from the get-go. It would have felt wrong to be extravagant or gaudy when dealing with such a heavy topic. The way the lines were written, despite very few actual descriptions, I could sense how she was feeling. They were teeming with emotions, so coming up with my images was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. I believe my images effectively convey those emotions. For the cover I have the title stuck in the middle of a box with a spider crawling down the side in which I took inspiration from a line in the story. For the first image, I wanted to show how desperate she was to scream thus the women shown is clawing at her neck as though that scream is creeping its way up. For the second image I wanted to convey how clueless and ignorant the guards were, so I made their heads/minds all fuzzy like in cartoons when a character is discombobulated. For my third and fourth images I wanted to show the two different views of putting the people in solitary confinement; with the guards seeing the people trapped behind bars and everyone else seeing the people as eager to escape and clawing their way out. I have the back cover simply as a justice fist because I believe that immigrants deserve justice for the treatment they get in these detention centers.