“I show up every morning with my cup of coffee ready to be wowed,” says May’s Member of the Month, John Roedel (JohnBigJohn), of his morning ritual with SMITH Magazine.

Since Roedel began taking his morning joe with a dash of SMITH in January, SMITH readers have likewise been wowed by Roedel, whose contributions most notably include stories about raising his autistic son such as Six-Word Memoir: “Doc said, ‘Autistic. ‘ I replied, ‘Artistic?’” and the My Life So Far piece entitled “Why Do We Kiss?”

“On paper, I am the least-abled father you could ever imagine who is tasked with the responsibility of caring for a child living with a special need,” says Roedel. (“Asshole in mirror is too self-critical” is another Six-Word Memoir of Roedel’s.)

“Make no mistake, watching your child struggle under the weight of autism is a very hard thing to endure,” says Roedel. “Often times when I write about my son Noah ‘s obstacles or hardships, I am writing from a place of heartbreak. Some of my Six-Word Memoirs are born out of absolute raw emotion.”

Recently, Roedel very graciously took a few moments from his busy life as a stay-at-home father of three, freelance writer and frequent burner of pancakes to answer six questions from SMITH.

Name: John Roedel
Town: Cheyenne, Wyoming
SMITH member since: January 6, 2012

We love your contributions since you began submitting them earlier this year. What keeps you coming back to SMITH? Read more »

At this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, SMITH founder and editor, Larry Smith, and Andrew Macguire, founder of InternMatch.com, led a panel about how small business can offer an effective and ethical internship program. We had a great conversation with the assembled crowd (a large one, especially given that we were scheduled the same time as the festival’s biggest star, Anthony Bourdain), and we ended our chat with our “Six Rules for Rocking an Internship Program.”

1. Promote your hiring brand, not just your position.
2. Hire for cultural fit as well as skills.
3. Manage expectations early. Read more »

SMITH Magazine starts here on the web for many of us, but each year we’ve ramped up the rest of what hope is a 360-degree storytelling experience for the community. And there’s truly nothing like emerging from behind the screens and experiencing live storytelling. We have an awesome line-up of live events this spring and hope you’ll join us for evenings of fun, surprising, inspirational storytelling.

March 6, Los Angeles: The Moment reading and show at Los Angeles so-cool Gallery at The Bootleg, 2220 Beverly Boulevard, 7-9pm, with actor Stephen Tobolowsky, Ray Richmond, Rich Ferguson, Rebecca Woolf, Sascha Rothschild, Jeremy Toback, Elizabeth Jayne Liu, Laura Cathcart Robbins, Christine McDonald, and Craig T. Williams.

March 8, San Francisco: The Moment reading at SF’s indie gem, Booksmith, with Caroline Paul, Aaron Huey, Steve Silberman, Matthew Zapruder, Kirk Citron, Mo Clancy, Julia Halprin Jackson, Christine MacDonald, Michael Castleman, Ellen Sussman, and Caitlin Roper. RSVP on Facebook. Read more »

“My peeps are awesome,” McConnell says of her fellow SMITH Magazine contributors. “They keep me laughing.”

We can’t get enough of Mary McConnell, known as MaryMc on SMITH, whose 2,000+ Six-Word Memoirs embody the roll-up-your-sleeves, can-do spirit that is so essential to our community. “Mary will do it, no problem!” reads one of her typical Six-Word Memoir. “My theory used to be that everything could be funny, eventually,” says McConnell. “I realized I was wasting a lot of time waiting for eventually to come.”

McConnell’s year hasn’t been the easiest thus far. (In one recent Six-Word Memoir, she writes: “‘I’m in the process of dying.’” Backstory: “Yes, Dad. You are.”) Even so, McConnell insists on soldiering on with grace, wit and a healthy sense of the absurd. “Felt the need to explain purchases,” writes McConnell after she purchased 12 pairs of high-waisted granny panties (for her 82-year-old mom, not for herself, she wished she’d explained to the bored teenager at the cash register). Read more »

We’ve seen Six-Word Memoirs in a lot of forms—from books, to board games, calendars and T-shirts—but this one, quite literally, takes the cake. February’s Member of the Month is Callie, who goes by the handle songwriter on SMITH Teens, and is a thirteen-year-old six-word savant from Ohio. She first discovered SMITH Teens in school, when an enrichment teacher had her class write a few. Inspired, she immediately went home, created an account and has been writing six-worders (sometimes as many as 30 a day) ever since. She’s on Six-Word Memoir 1,770…and counting.

On Callie’s thirteenth birthday, her family surprised her with a SMITHTeens birthday cake of epic proportions. Not only was the SMITH Teens logo depicted perfectly in green frosting, but friends and family decorated the cake with their own Six-Word Memoirs. Sounds deliciously literary. About the SMITHTeens community, Callie says: “It’s such a supportive place. I always find memoirs I can relate to and it’s nice to know there are other people going through the same things I am. I just feel understood and accepted by the members. Going on the site always brings a smile to my face.”
To find out more about this thirteen-year-old Six-Word musical memoirist check out her answers to our “Six Questions For…” interview below. Read more »

SMITH Magazine is meant to be a 360 storytelling experience, from our web site to our books to our live storytelling shows and slams. We’ve got a huge line-up of live events this winter and spring and hope you’ll join us for evenings of fun, surprising, inspirational storytelling. (The crowds are extremely smart and attractive, too.)

January 9, NYC: The Moment book reading at McNally Jackson Books, 7pm, 52 Prince St., with A.J. Jacobs, Alan Rabinowitz, Mira Ptacin, Matt Dojny, Karol Nielsen, Jerry Ma, Piper Kerman, Vivian Chum, and Gillian Laub.

January 26, Brooklyn: The Moment book reading at Greenlight Books, 686 Fulton St. Brooklyn 7:30pm, with after-party for SMITH Mag’s 6th anniversary. With Josh Axelrod, Summer Pierre, Daniel DiClerico, Alaa Majeed, Julie Metz, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Piper Kerman, Vivian Chum, Jeff Chuch, Fiona Mazel, Colin Nissan, Emily Steinberg, Cheryl Della Pietra, and Gillian Laub.
Read more »

Six years ago, on January 6, 2006, I launched SMITH Magazine. It was about time.

For three years prior, I wandered in the media desert, looking for funding or a fancy publishing partner. I got meetings because I had been working in magazines for a while and had a prototype created by legendary art director Robert Priest (whose SMITH logo still graces these pages today). I preached the gospel of what I called, “A new kind of magazine, a print/web hybrid that would be written by everyone and edited by professionals.” And then I was shown the door.

What to do? It was time to stop looking up and start looking around, as well as inward. My co-founder was my old college buddy, Tim Barkow, who frequently reminded me that we’d never create something new if we attempted to do so the old way, with the old rules. Inventive independent media makers like Dave Eggers, Shoshana Berger, Deanna Brown, and Lisa Haines all said the same thing: just do it, dude. And so we did. On January 6, 2006, National Smith Day (a day which existed already in honor of John Smith, one of the early Jamestown, Va., settlers, and/or 19th century mountaineer Jedediah Smith), we launched SMITH online.

I handled the content and editing. Tim programmed and designed the site from scratch with the help of Wordpress, the platform we still use. Our friend, Alex Hart, gave us free server space, because he’s the kind of guy who has server space. Lisa guided as we we started to turn a passion into a viable business proposition. Rachel Fershleiser later joined and became my incredible Six-Word Memoir co-editor. Jeff Newelt, aka JAHFurry, brought comics to SMITH, further expanding the ways we could tell stories here. Along the way, to crib from one six-worder I love, “Many hands have kept us afloat.” *

In previous posts I recount our origin and our mission, but the short story is that SMITH was inspired by my grandfather, a small-town pharmacist who knew everyone else’s story but was notably shy when discussing his own. Read more »

For Member of the Month Lynn LeBlanc, known as Loon,
Six-Word Memoirs are a family affair. Once LeBlanc got the Six-Word bug, he explains, “I began to compose thousands of Six-Word Memoirs and
pestering my close friends and relatives to read and evaluate them.” In the process of writing over 5,000 Six-Word Memoirs, he inspired his mother, aka NicknameBill, his daughter Julie Wakefield, aka FinchGirl, and even his eight-year-old granddaughter Madilynn Capri LeBlanc-Wakefield, aka Beauty12, to
join SMITH and contribute their own memoirs.

“All of them have been featured at one time or another,” says LeBlanc. This prolific sixer recently took a few minutes out of his day to answer six questions from SMITH Magazine. Read more »

Welcome to SMITH. We’ve just turned six.

If you’ve found this post at SMITH or clicked on the link from your “verification email,” you’re probably new to our storytelling community. Whether 6 or 600 words, that is our passion, our drive: storytelling. Our tagline is “Everyone has a story. What’s yours?” Here’s part of ours.

The most popular neighborhood in the SMITH community is Six-Word Memoirs. More than half a million Six-Word Memoirs have been written and shared by our members and on our site for teen scribes, SMITH Teens. We’ve created and published seven books of Six-Word Memoirs (including a Japanese translation) and are always working on more. (For a history of the project, watch this video from the PopTech conference). Who knows? Your memoir might be part of our next book! The heart and soul of Six-Word Memoirs happens right here on the website where smart, fun, engaged and thoughtful community members share parts of their lives in six words every day.

You can write as much or as little as you like. Some members post multiple memoirs daily, others share sporadically and a few “write and run.” If you poke around the site and start coming back regularly, you’ll be welcomed by other members and will experience what a true community SMITH Magazine is. So what makes a great community? Great community members. Here are six secrets to having a great experience on SMITH. Read more »

SMITH enthusiasts were sharing Six-Word Memoirs at Saucy Burt’s meatball sandwich cart in downtown Minneapolis on a chilly fall day when December’s Member of the Month Amanda Bausch, her husband Sherman, and her three-year-old son Elijah (pictured above) rolled up on their bikes to join in on the impromptu six-word slam and meatball chow-down.

With a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, Sherman Bausch counted six words on his fingers: “My beard likes the meatball sandwiches!” Elijah piped up with a ponderous six-word question: “Why is fire so hot, Dad?” And Amanda Bausch opined on life with her quirky family: “Better than I could have planned.”

“I’m pretty sure I was counting my words for the rest of the day,” says Bausch, who joined SMITH Magazine’s online community that evening.

Recently, between cycling, yoga, raising her son Elijah, and visits to Saucy Burt’s, Amanda Bausch took a few minutes to answer six questions from her home in Minneapolis. Read more »