In 2005, I worked as a creative writing assistant for a month-long art program called Arts Alive. The creative writing artist in residence, Jenn, is one of the most creative people I know. She’s constantly doing brilliant, inspiring things and putting fun twists on art projects.
That summer, she introduced me and the creative writing group to altered books, most notably Tom Phillips’s A Humument. The overall idea is to bring new life to an old book. To do this, you pick out some choice words and/or phrases of the original text. Then you cover up everything else by collaging, painting, drawing, and/or mixed-media-ing over it. This creates an entirely new story.
To say I LOVED THIS IDEA SO MUCH is putting it mildly. I made an insane amount of altered pages that summer and continued to do so during my final year at college; I brought all my art supplies back to my dorm room and treated the pages of Sweet Valley High #25 Nowhere to Run. (A friend who loves sci-fi fascinated found the resulting context-free tagline to be particularly arresting: “What will the Droids do without Emily?”)
The creative writing students and I altered crumbling pages from two early-1900s novels (Brave and Bold and The Telegraph Boy). Then we combined our pages and put them in an agreed-upon order to create a vague, mysterious story called The Rogue. I now present that work to you in full:
Leave a comment with your own interpretation about what happens in this story. Please also share if you’ve worked on an altered book project yourself!
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