The Hair Book
by Nicole Phillips
Author’s Description
Boehm and Matsuda’s Flower Arranging by Number is an instructional guide to creating beautiful centerpieces and bouquets. In today’s culture, there is no bigger centerpiece for a woman than her hair. A woman’s hairstyle can say many things about her mood or personality. A bouncy and curly bob can say she is feeling fun and flirty. A polished up-do can convey professionalism. Thus, I altered this book to become “Nicole’s Hair Guide.” It is a fanciful pictorial of hairstyles.
I started with the cover and created a fun, flirty and curly up-do. By stapling and gluing hair extensions to the cover, I created a glitzy self-portrait with makeup and jewelry. I continued to the title page by pasting various pictures. In subsequent pages, I used permanent markers to delete words or phrases and create a new storyline. This method is called creating a “found poems.” I encourage other writers to create an altered book to expand their minds or grow in a new literary direction.
Editorial Board Review:
Hair is, to some, a very important aspect of life as Nichole shows this through her altered book. She is able to take a book originally about flower arranging and making it into a story about hair. Her selected phrases on her altered pages develop more of a story than just a found poem. There are some powerful phrases: “The pleasure of a bountiful harvest is always joyous,” for example.
Nicole’s cover is the most striking of all – it includes its own hairpiece and necklace, giving it a lot of depth. Nichole also managed to put a lot of herself and her personality in the book by including pictures of her with a lot of different (and sometimes crazy) hairstyles that represent hairstyle changes through different eras of American history.
