Shape&Nature Press, a local Greenfield-based small press, invites the local community to participate in The Favorite Words Project, an art/publishing installation which collects people’s favorite words and publishes them on bumper stickers and t-shirts as a living installation.  Shape&Nature Press has also launched a fundraiser to help fund the project on Kickstarter.com, which runs through November 13.

The Favorite Words Project is the first creative book project by Shape&Nature editors Maria Williams-Russell and Janet MacFadyen, who started collecting favorite words and publishing them on bumper stickers and t-shirts in their home offices in April 2011. Their intentions were to celebrate language, to begin a dialogue about the role of words in people’s lives, and to bring these words together to hear the whole community speak. At the end of one year, all collected words will be published in traditional book form.

Since April, the project has gone international, receiving words from people in France,England, Ireland, Russia, Poland, Mexico and Brazil, as well as from all regions of the United States. “This is about people communicating through their favorite words; in the U.S., the words really show a cross-section of the whole country,” says Williams-Russell. “We’d love to see more words from western Massachusetts!” 

Participants simply submit their word and in return receive a free bumper sticker with their word on it. Each participant becomes an official “author” of the final book and receives an author certification card from the press. The press accepts any word in any language which can be found in the dictionary or is commonly used as slang.

To help fund the cost of bumper stickers, mailing, and the final book, Shape&Nature

has turned to Kickstarter.com, an online arts fundraising site. When people donate to the

project through Kickstarter, they not only become participants of the project, they also receive donor prizes, such as t-shirts, free copies of the book, acknowledgement by name in the book—even their favorite word on the cover.