This Book Will Either Make You Twitch or Liberate You – Mess by Keri Smith

My copy of Mess – the Manual of Accidents and Mistakes by Keri Smith (September 7, 2010, Penguin Group, ISBN 978-0-399-53600-7) arrived with a skid mark on the cover from the packaging getting punctured during shipping. I actually thought it was part of the look of the book!

Now, I hold in my hands the heap of a book – dirty, torn, rumpled and a thing of pure beauty. Over the Labor Day weekend, my kids and their friends spent over an hour spilling, smudging, dragging and generally abusing this book, which is EXACTLY as Smith intended.

Within the pages of Mess, Smith dares us to:

• Drop some kind of colored liquid (ink, tea, coffee) onto a page from a good height (at least five feet)
• Draw in the dark (or with eyes closed)
• Creatively misspell words
• Paint a picture in a water-based medium (pen, marker, watercolor, etc.) and leave it out during a rain or snowstorm
• Bury the book and dig it up

Smith, the author of Wreck this Journal, How to Be an Explorer of the World and This is Not a Book, writes in the introduction:

“We all know what it feels like to fall, but how many of us have experimented with gravity as a medium? Isn’t falling or breaking things something we only do by accident?”

She goes on to define “mistake” or “accident” – “happenings or occurrences by which the creator does not have complete control over the final outcome…We might also call them ‘experiments.’”

My kids read the book with glee, page after page of instructions on how to generally destroy the book. The thought of ruining a book to them sounded like so much fun. The thought made me twitchy…disrespecting a book is almost outside my DNA programming. But watching their joy was incredibly fulfilling.

I found it amusing that my review copy showed up in an envelope that had somehow gotten a hole in it and the cover was smudged when I opened it. I actually thought maybe that’s what was intended until I realized it was from the mail package. Now it has a skid mark on it from being dragged behind a bike.

One page directs the reader to drop some sort of colored liquid from a significant height (over 5 feet). They were delighted to think of standing on our upper landing and dripping coffee onto the book.  They smeared charcoal from our fire pit on a page with their elbows. They splattered soda on one page. They were in heaven.

The book now looks exactly as you would expect.

Smith writes in the introduction that the book is really about improvisation – which involves “throwing ourselves off balance for a time, into a situation where we have to make decisions on the spot.” Kids are still so pure and getting used to being “off balance” – adults, on the other hand, don’t go so easily.

But once you get going, the book really becomes a source of liberation; it frees you to make a mess, stop thinking about the outcome and just enjoy the process. Let go. See what happens. And enjoy your complete disregard for the outcome.  You gotta check out this book, plus your kids will be thrilled! What a great family activity.

Author Keri Smith