The Challenge

A brief of creating a series of 3 typographic posters for the book This Accident of Being Lost was assigned. The book was thoroughly researched and analyzed individually and in a class setting in order to create a compelling series of posters that reflected upon certain themes within the book.

Common Literary Themes

Recurring literary themes throughout the text include:

Loneliness as destructive force

• Character changes due to lack of attention from others
• Identity and lack thereof

Companionship as salvation

• A need for acknowledgment from friends and loved ones
• A strong obsession over social media “likes”

Technology in society – good vs. bad

• Obsession with social media and being “seen”
• Social media as a crutch for real human interaction
• Love and hurt
• Aging
• Identity and loss of identity
• Oppression of women

Characters

Speaker

• The speaker is established in a way that dislocates the reader: it may be difficult for them to understand what is real and what is metaphorical. This juxtaposition symbolizes the dislocation and displacement of Anishinaabe identity, culture, and values
• The speaker suffers through most of the literary themes, such as the search for identity and loneliness

Plot

This Accident of Being Lost is a creative response to the dislocation, assault and abuse of indigenous individuals, with an emphasis on indigenous women.

The plot takes on different mediums and characters in order to represent different literary themes. The story teeters back and forth between issues above and below the surface (some stories are written to be initially understood only by Anishinaabe, but others can be understood by a variety of readers). However, all of the stories are loosely connected in order to portray the unfortunate erasure of a culture and the response of identity regained by indigenous women.

In an interview with CBC Books, the author, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, reflects upon her concept of This Accident of Being Lost as follows:

“I wanted it to be a taking stock of sort of all of the things that had been erased and stolen from me as an Indigenous woman in 2017, so things like land, culture, language, a sense of well-being, a feeling of safety and freedom.”

(L. Betasamosake Simpson, personal interview, February 10, 2017).

Individually, this input helped to inspire different ideations for a set of posters that would represent the different elements that were “lost” by characters throughout the book, and lost in real life. This was the starting point for merging type, image, and literature in an impactful way.

Making the Narrative Visual

This Accident of Being Lost is a story that has themes of loneliness, isolation, and a yearning for love and acceptance. Several recurring motifs include:

• Fragmentation and disconnection, whether it be in the form of social, physical, or emotional disconnection
  • Social disconnection: disconnection between characters in-person, mention of social anxieties as well as a struggle with technology and social media
  • Physical disconnection: disconnection from the land, experience of body dysmorphia
• Emotional disconnection: disconnection from emotions, feelings of emptiness/apathy or embracing sadness
• Sadness (portrayed as both an emotion and a lover)
• Time (running out)
• The Elements: drawing back to land, water, earth and fire, as well as the intense feelings behind them

The aforementioned motifs were utilized to create a mood board in order to begin the process of translating the book into a visual narrative.

Mood Board

Project Information