My initial thoughts for my project were to turn my archival research about Jack Kerouac (which is for my thesis) into a novel for young adults. I thought the challenge might be how to make his life appropriate and relatable to young people.  However, in the light of this week’s readings, I’m starting to have new ideas.

The Jordan article about Gordon Matta-Clark–specifically the discussion of social sculpture–inspired me in that it made me want to do something political and provocative, tangible and meaningful.  It made me want to “respond directly to real people and the issues that affected them” (Jordan 37).  And the “real people” that I’d respond directly to could be Kerouac’s fellow young people who felt boxed in by society’s expectations of them.

Then I read the Pink article about using sensations to help people understand and process my work. And since words are “nearly empty of meaning” (Pink 265) I had the thought to add images to my project.  And while I cannot walk around with Kerouac, I can take photographs of the places he went in New York and use images of advertisements that he would have seen.

Now I am thinking that I could make a picture book of Jack Kerouac’s life–using collage to make the “illustrations”.  I could find and cut up tons of different images from his era (WWII, the Cold War, Civil Rights) and arrange them together to fit the narrative.  I might want to find a theme or a moral his life teaches, because that’s the nature of picture books. That might be what I discover along the way.