Wreck This Journal Expanded Ed. Author: Visit Amazon's Keri Smith Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0399161945 | Format: EPUB
Wreck This Journal Expanded Ed. Description
Review
"No matter where you start or where you end, there's always something interesting to do...The book is an exploration into creativity."
(Buffalo News)
About the Author
Keri Smith is a bestselling author, illustrator, and thinker. Her books demonstrate a 'learn by doing approach', and are being used in school curriculums all over the world as a way of fostering non-traditional methods of exploration. She also teaches and conducts workshops based on her non-traditional techniques across North America. Her books include: Wreck This Journal, How to Be an Explorer of the World, This is Not a Book, Mess - A Manual of Accidents and Mistakes, Finish This Book, and Pocket Scavenger. She enjoys spending time with her husband, experimental musician Jefferson Pitcher, and two children Tilden and Ida.
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Perigee Trade; Csm Exp edition (August 7, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0399161945
- ISBN-13: 978-0399161940
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
For some reason, during preorder, I thought this was a book to read. Like, a book full of words that you sit down in a chair with a cup of coffee and read through from start to finish. You know...a *book*.
When it arrived, then, I was a little disappointed to find that it wasn't, in fact, a book to read at all. It looked like just journal prompts -- bits of writing on the page and lots of blank space for you to fill in. I set it aside.
I picked it back up when I was getting ready to put it on the shelf, where it would have languished with the other books I'd get around to someday. I flipped through it. A prompt caught my eye.
I started reading the prompts and blurbs, and it started sinking in: this isn't a book at all. This is PARTICIPATORY. This is a book that doesn't let you sit there, passively, with your coffee, just observing what the author's trying to say. This is a book that makes you get up, makes you smear it with crazy and beat it up in ways that most people couldn't imagine treating their books or journals. Especially not a journal. Wrecking a *journal*?
Over the next few days, I carried this book with me and beat the livin' tar out of it. I followed the prompts. I wrote on pages with food and with my tongue. I ripped pages out and crumpled them up and stuck them back in. I sat with it in a chair with my coffee, for sure, but I also spilled coffee on it -- on purpose. I wrote in things backwards and scribbled really, really hard.
In short, this book went through things that most of us should never have to. I kicked this thing around and waited while it came back for more.
And, you know...? It was TREMENDOUSLY LIBERATING.
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