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52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity by Jeffrey Yamaguchi

A Book to Inspire Your Next Creative Endeavor

52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity is a book brimming with creative project-making ideas based on Jeffrey Yamaguchi's Web site www.52projects.com.

Creativity Portal found 52 Projects incredibly inspiring and a glorious prompt into your own world of project making with unlimited possibilities to get you going. What you'll find in this book is best summed up in an answer to What is 52 Projects?:

52 Projects is an eclectic collection of offbeat, exploratory, artistic projects; memory inducing and life-affirming writing exercises; photographic assignments that capture the essence of fleeting moments and times that you wish could last forever; exploration of the arts — from the culinary to the literary; ideas for giving from the heart; mail art that seals in and delivers the true treasure of friendship; video- and tape-recording schemes that secure for the future an unedited and unfiltered understanding of the past; ideas to document and preserve the little details that make up the life you are living; archeological digs through cluttered drawers and dusty boxes; and adventures that take you to places that you have never been before, even though they're right in front of you. (p.1-2)

Here's a sample project from 52 Projects, courtesy of the author:

Project #33

FIND THE FIRST POEM YOU EVER WROTE.

Read it over. Try to remember the story of why you wrote it, what inspired you, and who it was for. Write it all down.

Then, write a new poem. Once you're done, date it, and put your first poem and the new one back in the place where you found the first one, so that they can both be rediscovered at some point in the future.

5 Variations on Project #33

33.1 Find the first story you ever wrote. Give it a good read and spend some time enjoying the memory of how you came up with the idea and put it down on paper. Then, rewrite the story.

33.2 Find the first letter you got during your high school years. Look up the person who penned the note, and then send a reply. (Enclose a copy of the original letter.)

33.3 Find your first journal. Sit down and read it all the way through (as painful as that might be), making notes in your current journal along the way. What can you remember like it happened yesterday? What extremely significant event, as covered in one or more entries, is something that you can't, for the life of you, remember at all? What makes you blush, and what brings it all back? What makes you think, "What the hell was I thinking?" What makes you wish you could go back in time and do it all over again? What makes you thank God it's all over? What's it like rediscovering the early discoveries of your life, as written down in your first journal? What lessons have you learned, it seems, over and over again?

33.4 Find the first pictures you ever took with your very first camera.

33.5 Find the very first picture ever taken of you with the love of your life.

Learn more about 52 Projects from the author's Web site, and read its lauding reviews or buy online at Amazon.com. •

11/24/05