The college I work for has a sort of open house for local high school students once a year. The idea is to show them what is available as far as possible programs and future careers. This year there was a theme too, recycling and going green. This made me think of book art, especially altered books and artist Tom Phillips who is known for recycling an old book and turning into a new narrative.

In the past, our approach to this event has been to try to talk to students and get them to discuss their career goals, but we have  never been that thrilled with the outcome. At 15 or 16, how many teens really know what they want to do? So this year, we decided to make our presentation as interactive as possible, and that is where altered text comes in. We briefly discussed the idea that you can literally recycle text to create new meaning, and then we let them loose with paper, magazines, old books, glue, markers, glitter, and even crayons.

We challenged them to write a new story using old paper material that would normally be thrown away. Think cut up text combined with the idea of those word magnets you can use to make poetry. Mix those up, and that’s the idea we offered them.

Pictured above are just a few of the finished products. Considering they really only had about 20 minutes and no preconceived ideas about what they were going to do, I was very impressed with the outcome. They seemed to have a great time. They were smiling and talking and making a huge mess of the place!

It was a fun day and nice to be able to combine two things I like, writing and crafting.