Our birth story
SMITH was founded by Larry Smith and Tim Barkow on January 6, 2006, National Smith Day. From day one, our mission has been to be a place for storytelling, with a focus on personal narrative. For more on our humble beginnings, read Larry’s long, somewhat rambling launch-day birth story post. To meet some of the people who make SMITH happen, check out our team page.

Our mission
SMITH magazine celebrates the joy of storytelling.

SMITH is a home for storytelling of all forms and kinds, with a focus on personal narrative. We believe everyone has a story, and everyone should have a place to tell it.

Storytelling has never been easier, more democratic, and, on the good days, interesting. It’s an amazing time for media makers, one in which content is often bottom up rather than top down, aspirational, populist, forward thinking, and most of all, participatory. SMITH is both a place for professional and never-before-published writers, artists, and photographers, bound together by a passion for storytelling.

Your stories
Stories find their way to SMITH in two ways:

1. Directly from anyone who is a registered user (you can sign up while submitting your story in one short, simple step). Registered users can submit to any of our story projects, including six-word memoirs, Brushes with Fame, Memoirs in progress, My Ex, and The PopuList, a weekly reader question.

2. By submitting to editors, who both assign and accept stories over the transom. These stories can be found in our Obsessions section (which covers topics such as weird jobs, war, the ever-popular beautiful pregnant women series, and photo essays) and Memoirville (excerpts and interviews from published memoirists).

For more on how to contribute to SMITH, as well as our copyright policies, please see our writers’ FAQ.

Our form
As you can see, SMITH is an online magazine. In the future, we’d like you to be able to take a version of SMITH to the beach and the bathroom, and one day you might. However, we’re currently focusing on SMITH online, as well as putting out books, such as Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing) NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: Six-Word Memoirs By Writers Famous & Obscure (Harper Perennial). Click here if you’re the type of person who would get a kick out of reading about SMITH Mag’s journey from print prototype (one designed by magazine legend Robert Priest) to happily humming web site that grows in stories and readers each and every day.

Our name
We thought you might ask. SMITH is the most popular surname in America. It represents us all, each of us living our extraordinary lives—day by day, story by story.