Resources
Are you covering the GIVE IT UP project? Here are some useful resources.
Descriptions of GIVE IT UP (at various lengths)
Info on Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s previous object story telling experiments
Links to posts about each of the project’s contributors
You can also find the latest info — about the project’s schedule, for example — on this website’s ABOUT page.
GIVE IT UP’s Kingston debut would not be possible without the efforts of Karlie Flood (venue recruitment, publicity, logo design, more) and Bridget Badore (exhibit design, object photography, more).
GIVE IT UP: PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Short
GIVE IT UP is a place-based, interactive storytelling project from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker, creators of the fiction experiment SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS and the nonfiction series PROJECT:OBJECT. This summer, 10 Hudson Valley residents will share stories about what a particular object means to them. The objects will be displayed in venues around Kingston, along with the stories. Visitors to the exhibits and the project’s website will be invited to respond with suggestions, regarding each object, on why and how to … give it up. What can objects mean? How can we let meaningful objects go? Let’s find out together.
GIVE IT UP exhibits will run from August 15 through September 10. Subscribe to the project’s free newsletter at giveitupkingston.substack.com for updates and behind-the-scenes info.
Medium
Beginning with their much-discussed SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS fiction experiment, for fifteen years now Josh Glenn and Rob Walker have investigated what objects mean — and how they mean what they mean — via creative storytelling projects.
GIVE IT UP is a place-based, interactive sequel to Josh and Rob’s nonfiction endeavor PROJECT:OBJECT. The goal of GIVE IT UP is to explore what (and how) objects mean, share our objects’ stories with one another… and develop tactics for letting go of even our most meaningful possessions. GIVE IT UP will launch this summer in Kingston, New York.
Josh (a recent Kingston transplant) and Rob have recruited 10 interesting people from the Hudson Valley to participate. Each participant will write a nonfiction narrative about why a certain object is too meaningful for them to give up… even though they might like to do so. Each significant object, along with the object owner’s explanatory essay, will be placed on (solo) exhibit — in a Kingston venue, spread across the city’s uptown, midtown, or downtown zones. Visitors to each exhibit (or to the project website) will be invited to persuade a participant to give up his or her significant object.
The objects will then be collected in a single venue (Camp Kingston) for a group exhibit, and a final celebration and reading — at which time the most persuasive responses will be announced, and the project’s participants will bid a fond farewell to their objects… forever!
What can objects mean? How can we let meaningful objects go? Let’s find out together.
GIVE IT UP exhibits will run from August 15 through September 10. Subscribe to the project’s free newsletter at giveitupkingston.substack.com for updates and behind-the-scenes info.
Long
Beginning with their much-discussed SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS fiction experiment, for fifteen years now Josh Glenn and Rob Walker have investigated what objects mean — and how they mean what they mean — via creative storytelling projects.
GIVE IT UP is a place-based, interactive sequel to Josh and Rob’s nonfiction endeavor PROJECT:OBJECT. The goal of GIVE IT UP is to explore what (and how) objects mean, share our objects’ stories with one another… and develop tactics for letting go of even our most meaningful possessions. GIVE IT UP will launch this summer in Kingston, New York.
Josh (a recent Kingston transplant) and Rob have recruited 10 interesting people from the Hudson Valley to participate. Each participant will write a nonfiction narrative about why a certain object is too meaningful for them to give up… even though they might like to do so.
The project’s participants and their objects:
Writer, Lit Hub podcaster, and bookstore manager Drew Broussard will give up… WOODEN SCIMITAR
Writer and artist Karlie Flood will give up… BROKEN BARRETTE
Author and music critic Will Hermes will give up… “ANCORA IMPARO” PLAQUE
Midtown Kingston Arts District (MKAD) Board of Directors president Maggie Inge will give up… ANTIQUE EVENING BAG
Writer and editor Halimah Marcus will give up… NYC BICYCLE
Journalist, filmmaker, and writer Annie Nocenti will give up… THUMB-PUMP OILER
Writer and photographer Julian Richards will give up… UNDEVELOPED FILM
Camp Kingston founder Samuel Shapiro will give up… BIRCH BARK
Musician and author Adam Snyder will give up… PROTECTOGRAPH
Rondout Valley Middle School librarian and author Emma Tourtelot will give up… MARRIAGE DISH
Each significant object, along with the object owner’s explanatory essay, will be placed on (solo) exhibit — in a Kingston venue. Visitors to each exhibit (or to the project website) will be invited to persuade a participant to give up his or her significant object. The participating venues are:
DOWNTOWN
Brunette
Half Moon Rondout Café
Maison Après
MIDTOWN
The DRAW Gallery at MKAD
Red Owl
Rewind Kingston
Tilda’s Kitchen & Market
UPTOWN
Camp Kingston
Salt Box
Utility Bicycle Works
The objects will then be collected in a single venue (Camp Kingston) for a group exhibit, and a final celebration and reading — at which time the most persuasive responses will be announced, and the project’s participants will bid a fond farewell to their objects… forever!
What can objects mean? How can we let meaningful objects go? Let’s find out together.
GIVE IT UP exhibits will run from August 15 through September 10. Subscribe to the project’s free newsletter at giveitupkingston.substack.com for updates and behind-the-scenes info.
PREVIOUS OBJECT STORY TELLING EFFORTS
In July 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker launched SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS, which became the first in a series of projects exploring the connection between objects and meaning. Previously Glenn had edited the nonfiction collection of surprisingly meaningful objects Taking Things Seriously, and Walker had written about material culture as a journalist.
An online literary experiment, SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS tested whether compelling stories could add quantifiable value to otherwise insignificant doodads, through a series of 100 auctions on eBay that paired yard sale ephemera with stories by writers such as William Gibson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Meg Cabot, Neil Labute, and Colson Whitehead. The successful experiment — prices rose by more than 2700% — attracted considerable attention online and in the lit press, and ultimately published over 100 more stories in subsequent series (raising money for writing-related nonprofits).
The project collaborated with Slate on a writing contest; guest curators and editors including The Believer, Electric Literature, Underwater New York,The Center for Cartoon Studies, and MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli; and organized a reading and participatory “Object Slam” as part of San Francisco’s Litquake, featuring Beth Lisick, Rob Baedeker, Miranda Mellis, Chris Colin, and Katie Williams.
In 2012, the project led to the SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS book, published by Fantagraphics. This was covered by The New York Times and NPR’s All Things Considered, among others, and inspired a collaboration and contest with Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360. The book debuted with a sold-out event at The Strand in New York City, featuring contributors Luc Sante, Matthew Sharpe, Mimi Lipson, Ben Greenman, Annie Nocenti, Shelley Jackson, and Jason Grote, Here’s a video about the project for The Future of Storytelling.
In January 2017, Glenn and Walker launched a sequel of sorts, PROJECT:OBJECT, publishing personal essays on Glenn’s site HILOBROW, in 25-story themed “volumes” —more than 250 nonfiction object stories to date.
The first volume, Political Objects, featured stories about personal objects with political significance by Virginia Heffernan, Alexis Madrigal, Carolina A. Miranda, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Steven Heller, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Gary Dauphin, and Tom Frank.
The second volume, Talismanic Objects featured stories by Gary Panter, Ben Ehrenreich, Jessica Helfand, Mark Frauenfelder, and more, as well as a reader story contest, The third volume, Illicit Objects, featured stories about illicit personal objects by Annalee Newitz, Paul Lukas, Douglas Rushkoff, Katie Notopoulos, Wesley Stace and more. This series also featured the project’s first audio stories, from Natalie Kestecher, Shelby El Otmani, Andrew Leland, Kalila Holt, Julia Barton, and others, later collected on an episode of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything.
In September 2017, PROJECT:OBJECT held a live event, “The Thing Is ... ,” at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, in collaboration with Bring Your Own (a live storytelling series) and The Stacks bookstore. Participating storytellers included Nathaniel Rich, Anne and Susan Gisleson, Michael Tisserand, Yuri Herrara, Alia Alia, and Juyanne James. Stories from the event were later broadcast individually on WWNO New Orleans.
The fourth PROJECT:OBJECT volume, Lost Objects, featured stories by Seth Mnookin, Laura Lippman, Margaret Wertheim, Seth, Geoff Manaugh, and Debbie Millman, among others, paired with original illustrations from artists including Lisa Congdon, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Kelli Anderson, Oliver Munday, Joe Alterio, and Matt Wuerker.
From 2018 to 2021, PROJECT:OBJECT published additional 25-story volumes on the themes:
Flair (true stories about significant accoutrements, appurtenances, and regalia)
Fossils (objects that bear witness to a vanished way of life)
Fetish (objects with which we are obsessed, to which we are devoted, and from the influence of which we cannot escape)
Objectionable Objects (narratives of offense, outrage, innocent transgression or principled affront, in attire, display, speech or spectacle; guest editor Adam McGovern).
Movie Objects (significant objects spotted in movies)
Semio Objects (nonfiction narratives about semioticians’ significant objects)
In 2022, the book LOST OBJECTS was published by Hat & Beard Press. It launched with events including a reading and discussion at McNally Jackson Seaport in New York featuring Dan Fox, Mimi Lipson, Debbie Millman, Stephen O’Connor, and Lucy Sante, and a reading at ChaShaMa in Brooklyn featuring Ben Katchor, Paola Antonelli, Ben Greenman, Mandy Keifetz, and Becky Stern. Press coverage included excerpts in Harper’s, The Boston Globe, and Lithub, as well as Glenn and Walker discussing their longtime collaboration (with each other, and with hundreds of writers and creators) on Slate’s podcast Working.
In 2025, GIVE IT UP, an interactive, place-based experiment in objects and value, launched in Kingston, New York.
Books chronicling Josh and Rob’s material-culture investigations include: Josh and Rob’s LOST OBJECTS (Hat & Beard Press, 2022) | Rob’s THE ART OF NOTICING (Knopf, 2019) | Josh and Rob’s SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS (Fantagraphics, 2012) | Rob’s BUYING IN (Random House, 2008) | Josh’s TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).
More info about Josh here; and about Rob here.
GIVE IT UP: PROJECT CONTRIBUTORS
We’ve posted headshots and bios for the project’s contributors to this website. Here are links. Photo credit for the headshots: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR .
HALIMAH MARCUS | WILL HERMES | DREW BROUSSARD | EMMA TOURTELOT | ADAM SNYDER | KARLIE FLOOD. Coming soon: SAMUEL SHAPIRO | JULIAN RICHARDS | ANNIE NOCENTI | MAGGIE INGE.
PS: If you’d like to use one of the other photos on this website, please get in touch.