To celebrate the beginning of this year’s South by Southwest music festival, Paul Ford from The Morning News wrote 1,302 six-word reviews of mp3s submitted by this year’s bands. I found the positive (Good voice, lots of moving parts.), negative (Wants me anxious, but I’m bored.), and borderline unintelligible (Why are bears in cages anyway?) [...]

Over at Memoirville, we’ve published Rebecca Touger’s interview with Susan Jane Gilman, author of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. Gilman chronicles her 1986 trip through China: “[We went] on a romantic impulse, hoping to become female Bryons and Kerouacs and impress the world with our derring-do. Instead, we found ourselves in a foreign [...]

On the opening day of SXSWi, I learned that handing a cop a Monopoly “get out of jail free card” will get you out of a speeding ticket (courtesy of spiky-headed Brian Brushwood at his “Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody” talk), the line “Maybe someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve [...]

Or, at least, each one of you meets Emily Steinberg, in Graphic Therapy: Notes from The Gap Years. Her illustrated autobiography chronicles life as a single, Jewish artist with more psychoanalysts than dates. Recent topics include matchmakers, Barbie, infomercial breast enhancement, country weekends, loyal dogs, male nudes, the High Holy Days, and Venus of Willendorf.

We whipped up a fun little addition for the community today–six-word valentines!
In conjunction with the release of our new book, Six-word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, we’ve prettied up our eCards so you can send your favorite six-word memoirs on love and heartbreak as valentines. Find a story you like and click “Send as eCard” [...]

D.C-based writer and photographer Emily Troutman has received a lot of attention this week for this stunning photo essay in which she asked D.C. residents to choose a single word to express how they feel about our new president.
President Obama: Words for How We Feel Now from Emily Troutman on Vimeo.
Participants were given the [...]

The Valentine’s Day Personal Media Mixer &
Confessional Culture Variety Show
With performances and activities by PostSecret, Found Magazine, Mortified, Six-Word Memoirs, Cassette from my Ex, and music by Michael Hearst of One Ring Zero.
Saturday, February 14th 2009
Doors at 8, Show at 8:30, Party til 11
Housing Works Bookstore Café
126 Crosby Street, NYC
Screw roses and candlelight. Nothing says [...]

Asking people questions and filming their responses is a pretty straightforward idea, and that’s exactly what we love about it. Fifty People One Question is a project that is currently traveling from city to city, recording what everyday people have to say when given the chance to let their minds wander. In New Orleans…

Every once in a while I take a whirl through SMITH’s “word explorer”— a visualization of the words that SMITH community members use the most. For obvious reasons, I clicked on Obama and found all sorts of gems, most six-word stories of one kind of another, such as “Gave up anarchy for Barack Obama,” [...]

Last night while at The Root party in DC at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, I realized I was standing in from of the Greensboro Lunch Counter, where in 1960, four African American students sat down at this counter and asked for service. Their request was refused. They didn’t budge, and the youth-led [...]