BODY OF TRUST – Book Collaboration

Steve Mitchell, Christine Kirouac and Andrew Saulters

2025

In early 2024, North Carolina author Steve Mitchell approached Winnipeg-based visual artist and Alabama-born book maker Andrew Saulter with an idea to make his second novel, Body of Trust, more than a book. During the following year, Kirouac and Mitchell delved into his text and developed a visual language of drawings, not meant to “illustrate” the tale of Mitchell’s four characters, but rather to expand their deep existential conflicts while drawing out those of the reader as well.

In addition to zoom discussions over the course of a year, Kirouac traveled to North Carolina twice in 2024 to draw daily at a table in the window of Mitchell’s Greensboro NC bookstore Scuppernong, where she poured over Mitchell’s words and drew inspired imaginings. Body of Trust is the story of four characters all struggling to either find their way back to or away from a cult commune in West Virginia (based on Mitchell’s own experience with his young family) while the world around them is engulfed by a plague called ‘The Weight’, killing most in its path. Ironically written prior to the pandemic, Mitchell’s text is deeply emotional and character rather than plot driven. Paired with Kirouac’s drawings of fictional and real landscapes and dead and alive things, these two unrelated narratives of story and image begin to connect in powerful ways to create other considerations for the reader to explore.

Enter Andrew Saulter, literature professor, writer, owner of NC Unicorn Poetry Press and the third collaborator of Body of Trust. Saulter set out structural parameters and printed, hand-sewed and bound one hundred copies of this three part art object that requires the reader to interact not only with the world Mitchell’s words and Kirouac’s drawings create, but with the physical object itself.

Body of Trust launched on March 1, 2025 and includes an original cover image, twenty-five graphite drawings, a hand-painted final fold-out image and three original art prints from the book by Kirouac. This limited edition is available at clouddiary.org.