A lovely and amazing video response to my own Bob Dylan-inspired six-word memoir video from YouTuber missxloverly.

I talk a lot about how the concept of Six-Word Memoirs takes on a life bigger than Hemingway or SMITH Magazine could have imagined. From classrooms to funerals, sports sites to spinning classes, theater groups and churches across the land, six-word memoirs have served as a powerful form of personal expression. Anyone can write one. [...]

When South Texas English teachers Adriana Castillo Solis and Stephanie Sauceda heard about Six-Word Memoirs, they immediately thought of their students. Nine classes at Pharr San Juan Alamo North High School studied the book, wrote their own memoirs, and created accompanying painting, photos, or collages.
Adriana writes “Initially, our project seemed like just a fun thing [...]

Since we launched the six-word memoir challenge on SMITH in late 2006, amazing things have happened that, literally, were not quite what we were planning, from a reverend in North Carolina who preached six-word prayers to a midwestern book blogger who created a six-word memoir “meme” that still races across hundreds of thousands of personal [...]

There’s no better part of making SMITH than witnessing what happens when we put out a call to our community for a challenge. Time and again, our readers/writers rock our world with their submissions to projects, contests, calls to convert a pregnancy story into a spot on a pickle jar—you name it. For a recent [...]

Carlin’s short, short life story can only be these seven words: Fuck. Shit. Piss. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.
My folks, to their considerable credit, took me to see George Carlin perform when I was, at best, 12 years old. Unforgettable. Later, at a stand-up comedy class I took, I performed his “A place for my stuff” [...]

Salon’s Table Talk discussion group goes wild with a Six words to great lit’rature thread. Here are a few of my favorites:
The times were good. Also bad.
A Tale of Two Cities
Man Sleeps with Mother. Gouging Ensues.
Oedipus the King
Woman Sleeps with Preacher. Branding Ensues.
The Scarlet Letter
Hell, Purgatory, Heaven and sweet Beatrice.
The Divine Comedy [...]

Since we started this project, inspired by a probably-apocryphal six-word Hemingway story, we’ve heard tell of the probably-apocryphal six-word epitaph “I told you I was sick.” It’s a great last-laugh tale, but I for one thought it was just that. No so, proves the equally clever Not Quite contributor Matt “Full life; impossible to summarize [...]

Note: This post is by Cree McCree, a veteran music scribe and author of the diary, Going Home to New Orleans. For more on the Big Easy, see SMITH’s all-true, serialized webcomic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.
Jazz Fest popped my cherry and good when I hit the mud running in 1988 and learned I [...]

This arrived by email from contributor (and my new hero) C.C. “Lived like no tomorrow; tomorrow came” Keiser. Count it as many times as you like—six words, 5-7-5 syllables. Pure genius:
Unexpectedly,
however belatedly,
accepted at last!