Defining your life in exactly six words can be the easiest thing in the world, or a seemingly impossible challenge. We’ve had bestselling memoirists take months to come up with a Six-Word Memoir they were happy with (seriously, one high-lit, household name sent in updates about his progress every couple months), while some of our SMITH Teeners zip out dozens at a time (and hundreds each day). All the while, teachers regularly ask us for our tips (note to teachers: contact us if you’d like our free Six-Word Memoir lesson plan), and someone from Yahoo! Answers recently asked the world, “Can anyone tell me how to write a Six-Word Memoir?” This short video—cribbed from Rachel Fershleiser’s “Six Tips” document—is the wonderful work of frequent Howcast.com animator Ben Oviatt, with an assist by SMITH’s own Lisa Qiu. Click, watch—and share your own Six-Word Memoir.

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From "Jewish Chops" by Harvey Pekar & Vanessa Davis

So our man has passed away and sadly didn’t get to see finished art to a handful of completed scripts, including guest artist Vanessa Davis’s charming rendering of “Jewish Chops,” here just in time for Rosh Hashanah. Davis, an outstanding autobiographical cartoonist in her own right, has a new collection out, Make Me A Woman, which was just awarded Heeb Magazine’s “Best Comic of 5770” and she recently created a lovely Harvey Pekar tribute for Tablet. (more…)

“I was writing the book at the same time that I was feeling very private, and these two things were coming towards each other in a collision course. Which one would win?”

What could Carl Jung and an American boy raised in Denver, CO possibly have in common? A lot, actually. Especially if that boy is Micah Toub, the son of two Jungian-trained therapists and author of the new memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks. Raised in a version of suburban America in which a trip to Skipper’s seafood chain restaurant could easily veer off into the land of “magical beings and visits from E.T.,” Toub was encouraged by his parents to consult his ally, confront his shadow, linger in “double-meta land,” and, after failing to get a hard-on during his first sexual encounter (yep, he went there), “become the erection.” (more…)

You’re walking along the street and all of a sudden, some random stranger catches your eye. You only get a glimpse before they’re gone, but there’s something about that person that makes them persist in your thoughts the rest of the day.

Nothing you can do about it, right? iSawYou strives to remedy that by allowing users to submit their stories of those ephemeral connections. Even if you don’t have your own sighting to report, iSawYou is a fascinating collection of stories. Some sightings are wistful—”I hope you notice me next time and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have the gumption to say ‘hello’.” Some sightings are bitter—”I’ll forgive you [for not saying hi] because you are surely embarrassed for the way you treated me.” And some are just very, very mysterious—”Your eyes were red and I wondered why.”

I see you, iSawYou, using the power of the internet so that maybe people can find The One for them that had been so darn elusive…
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Obama sent troops home, Paris got into another pickle, and Earl reminded us that Mother Nature means business. Through our ups and down, the calm and the storm, your Six-Word Memoirs were like (fill in your own metaphor here SMITH readers—it’s been a long week). Here are six six-worders we love from the week ending September 3. Click on each author’s name to check out more memoirs.

Most Zen: “Silence: golden, and too often misquoted.” —KaleidoscopeEyes
Most Conflicted: “Enthusiasm used up on my students.” —Aimiee (profile pic, above).
Worst Way to Start the School Year: “School starts tomorrow. On my period.” —Life’s No Fairytale, from SMITHTeens
Most Conflicted: “Katrina: destruction, disgrace, humanity. My name.” —Kriskelli
Best Wordplay: “Anxiety attacks are my only cardio.” —VoxandQuill
Timeliest Universal Truth: “Life is stormy, dance in rain.” —Sweener, from our new six-word project, Six Words on Pain & Hope, with the nonprofit, To Write Love on Her Arms.

PLUS:
• Make a T-Shirt: over on our shop at Spreadshirt
• Follow us on Twitter for a Six-Word Memoir of the Day, or sometimes even two.
• Join our Facebook group, where you Like us, you really Like us.
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From themed contests, like Talbots’ call for memoirs about your beloved denim jeans, to recommendations from book-lovin’ librarians like Sarah, the shapes and form people apply to the Six-Word Memoir project are always just a Google Alert away. Here are some of our recent finds.

“Wishing I didn’t love Krispy Kremes.” Rachelle Gardner declares her love for memoirs–and Krispy Kreme donuts–in a recent post on her blog, “Rants & Ramblings: On Life as a Literary Agent,” in which she invited her readers to share their six-word memoirs. (more…)

“The memories felt encased. They were so accessible. I did not have to work to find the things I needed to write about. I think when the heart seizes, the mind grabs on, for whatever purpose.”

In the mid-1990s, Gail Caldwell–staff writer and critic for The Boston Globe–met bestselling memoirist Caroline Knapp (Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs). Both writers, dog lovers, former drinkers, and natural loners, the two women formed an intense bond. They became the kind of friends who live their lives side by side, speaking several times a day, walking their dogs and wandering the woods together near their joint hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. (more…)

Jonathan Franzen recently voiced his distaste for book trailers (while making one himself for his new book, Freedom). “This might be a good place for me to register my profound discomfort at having to make videos like this,” he says. “To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book. You’re either reading a book or you’re not. To me, the world of books is the quiet alternative and a more desperately needed alternative.”

Could be. Still, here at Memoirville we like to spread the word about book trailers we fancy. Exhibit K: Koren Zailckas’ new memoir, Fury, is a journey through her process of learning how to deal with her anger and rage. Even though she wrote a book, she does not take her readers to a still and quiet place. And neither does her trailer.

We also like that it looks like she made this video in her living room, with her family, and had fun doing so. Look out for an interview with Zailckas here on Memoirville right after Labor Day.
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