Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Upflow by Diego Gerard Morrison, which will be published on October 27, 2026 by Split/Lip Press. You can pre-order your copy here.
Mexico City’s water system is the costliest and most absurd on the planet. A series of dams in neighboring states hydro-elevate water past drought-stricken communities before water arrives, polluted and chemically treated, into the drained lakebed that used to be Tenochtitlan, heart of the Aztec Empire, and what is now the overgrown and arid metropolis of Mexico City. From there the water is used before black, residual wastewater finally filters back to the countryside to grow food for the city.
In Diego Gerard Morrison’s darkly funny, picaresque, and hydro-ethnological stories, Upflow follows the path of water in and out of Mexico City. Scarcity, pollution, corruption and even amplified earthquakes rise through the ghostly lakebed of Mexico City’s past to manifest in the present. Through surrealist and historical romps spanning the Spanish conquest, the subsequent desiccation of the lake, as well as modern stories warning of the near future, Upflow’s prescient fictions embody the fluid nature of water and how it often eludes those who need it most.
Here’s the cover, designed by David Wojciechowski:
Diego Gerard Morrison: Upflow is a collection of hydro-ethnological stories that maps the trajectory of water from its source and into the city, a calculated narrative that became a personal story for me as an author as well. Raised in one of the rural communities that houses a dam that feeds the city with water, and then moving to Mexico City, a metropolitan area that houses over 24 million people, I witnessed the chaos that the water supply system creates—including magnified earthquakes as collateral damage—and felt embodied and mirrored in the paradox. Throughout the daily beholding of a parched, thirsty landscape that only contains water which it can’t use, the cover of Upflow provides the ideal sensory experience of the communities that see the water bypass them on the way to the city—thirsty land that yearns for a green that can only arrive with water that is visible but far from grasp, that doesn’t belong to those who live in its midst.
When we talk about water in and around Mexico City, the first idea that comes to mind is scarcity and misuse, but perhaps also the imagined and utopian possibility of abundance as yearning, especially in a location that used to be a basin and a lake system that historically housed water. When it came to developing a cover for Upflow and its complexities, I was thinking about how a flat, bidimensional image could capture this odd dichotomy on paper, how its dry surface could also project the longing for wetness and its myriad manifestations. Split/Lip designer David Wojciechowski subtly, and seemingly telepathically, laid down these conflicting ideas even with the first drafts of his cover design. The shade of anemic green as background provided a subliminal potential for fertility, but at the same time felt reined in, a hue that still portrayed insufficiency, the perennial lack of the vital liquid, the inconvenient feeling of it’s never enough. In addition to color, David underlined the concept of scarcity by adding a texture to the image that mimics the furrows and cracks of soil in times of drought, figures that might be taken as rivers run dry, projecting the vanished water of some past. As a final layer, which anchors the aforementioned ideas, David added the shape of the country of Mexico as a single drop of water, which seems to pop from the page, tilting the visual odds in the favor of scarcity, which runs as the meandering thread throughout the collection. The magic of David’s cover lies in the nuanced and minimalist combination of promise, struggle, the feeling of being forever on the brink of hydric abundance and what it means for those living amidst this zeitgeist.
David Wojciechowski: Diego’s book is all about water (past, present, and future) as it relates to Mexico City, and, while I like the idea of avoiding the obvious, I felt that water needed to be on his cover. I explored a lot of possibilities from photographs to aquifer maps to abstractions. The trick was making sure the connection between water and Mexico was clear. The cover clicked when I stumbled upon the work of 3D modeler Hammad Khan. He had created these 3D maps of countries in different materials, so I approached him about making one of Mexico. What struck me about the finished map was, isolated by itself, it looked so small. The isolation and the lack of rippling on the water made it look like a drop of water in the shape of a country instead of, say, an ocean in the shape of a country. It really helped capture the scarcity aspect that Diego’s book explores. From there, it was a matter of making sure the text maintained that sense of minimalism and scale.
