Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, is hooked on six. Last year, when a Canadian radio station asked him to talk about the six-word memoir phenomenon (in our first book, his six-word memoir, written just as he was wrapping up his book series, is: “What? Lemony Snicket? Lemony Snicket? What?”), he wrote ten six-word memoirs on [...]

Newsweek runs one of the most lovely pieces on Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak to date. “Summing up a life, a romance or a trauma so succinctly may seem like an abomination out of the Twitter generation,” writes Jesse Ellison, “[but] what’s most remarkable is the range of sentiments, from the trivial to the [...]

SMITH Mag and the Six-Word Memoir project lead a story in Time magazine called “Haiku Nation.” “Like traditional Japanese poetry, the new pop-culture haiku says a lot with few words,” writes Jeremy Caplan. “These days digital eloquence is defined by pithiness. … In the book world, a surprise hit this year has been Not Quite [...]

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 [...]

Our first book of six-word memoirs, Not Quite What I Was Planning, featured life stories from “I’m ten and have an attitude” to “Seventy years, few tears, hairy ears.” Clearly it’s a concept that spans generations. But some of our very favorite responses came from teenagers, those smart, sassy, angst-filled truth-tellers whose lives are changing [...]

“Wrote a great novel. No sale.” “Quiet, Baby; Mama’s trying to think.” “Greatness costs many things, including privacy.” “Now be honest, and just lie.”
The above are just a few of the nearly 500 submissions to SMITH and Urbis’ “Six Words on the Creative Life,” a reader project launched just a few days ago. Submit your [...]

Urbis is one of our favorite creative communities. Like SMITH, Urbis is powered by writers, and gets bigger and better with each submission. While our thing is nonfiction personal narrative, Urbis’ community of creatives tend to focus on fiction, poetry, and screenplays-in-progress, with lots of peer reviews and ranking to spur on competition. Now we’ve [...]

Within the course of a few short weeks, we went from holding the soggiest six-word reading/slam to the sweatiest. Yet in many ways, Monday, June 9 at the Barnes & Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn this was the sweetest. At each reading, we always tell some “stories behind the stories,” mixing up tales from the [...]

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 [...]

Moms rock. This we know well. And the more than 1,000 six-word momoirs that poured in over the last two weeks rocked our world six inspirational, funny, and unusual words at a time. Here’s to all the moms with so many more stories to tell, in six words and many more.
The three winning momoir [...]