Houston It's Worth It (HIWI-The Book)

*** NOTE: In spite of appearances, 1000s of copies are available through Amazon. Click on "See all buying options" to order multiple copies.*** Houston. It's Worth It. (HIWI) happened organically in the summer of 2004. We were discussing why we love Houston, and why the city has a bad rep, and one of us came up with the phrase "Houston. It's Worth It." We put up a website where other Houstonians could express why Houston was worth it in their own words. The website continues to provide opportunities for Houstonians to voice their passion for a city that's so routinely misunderstood by outsiders. In the first phase of the campaign, visitors to the HIWI website were invited to tell us why they like Houston in spite of what we identified as the 20 Afflictions - the heat, the humidity, the flying cockroaches, the no mountains, etc. We sent out a little over one hundred emails to announce the site, eliciting an outpouring of emotion. Scores of people submitted detailed, thoughtful, sometimes quirky, almost always heartfelt arguments on the city's behalf For phase II of the campaign, we decided to test the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" and asked people to show us why they liked the city. We teamed up with the Houston Center for Photography (HCP) to create "Houston. It's Worth It. - Show Us Why," an open-call exhibition in which Houstonians were asked to submit to the HIWI website their personal photographs (as opposed to the stock imagery typically seen in convention bureau-type propaganda) relating to life in Houston. We received over 600 images, the majority of which came from amateurs, and hung every one of them in the exhibition which took place August 4-6, 2006. Once again, HIWI was a rousing success. We were so thrilled by the range of perspectives and idiosyncratic viewpoints in the show, that we instantly knew a book was the next step...