SMITH is in San Francisco for Litquake, a week-long festival of readings, panels, and parties. We’re thrilled to be a part of Litquake with a Six-Word Memoir Reading & Slam this Saturday, October 11 at 8:30 in Clarion Alley, between 17th & 18th Streets, Mission and Valencia Streets. On hand will be some famous […]

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. […]

Across the world, students, teachers, churches, and nonprofits organizations with names like the Hypoparathyroidism Association (devoted to helping folks with a rare medical disorder) have used the six-word memoir to inspire, encourage, and even help heal. We love hearing how six-word memoirs find their way into lives and organizations.
We just heard from the […]

If you’re in the New York area, stop by the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. Larry and I are chatting about the Six-Word Memoirs phenom
that inspired and launched projects cross the word. We’ll be found at the South Stage, 3pm. But stick around before and after to soak up all the Brooklyn litness: from Jonathan […]

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 […]

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 […]

Going to Philadelphia this past weekend was a sort of homecoming. It’s in Philly that I met SMITH cofounder Tim Barkow on the first day of college. Who can forget a guy who by way of introduction says, “My name is Tim. I like to paint sneakers.” He was a geek before I knew that […]

At the Six-Word Memoir event May 14 in Mankato, Minnesota, four of us contributors sat at a table telling our stories to the audience, all the while a guy with a fancy professional camera snapped pictures from every angle.

I didn’t know this man. I’ve lived in this town for 14 years, and having worked at […]

I think Philadelphia rocks. I grew up just 20 minutes outside the city, went to college there, am in and out of the city as often as I can. I loved the last Rocky movie, live for dinner in South Philly, have written thousands of words on Philly fans and am hopelessly devoted to the […]

Rachel and I are running around the West Coast, spreading the gospel of six-word memoirs from Los Angeles to San Francisco (we’re having a party and six-word slam tonight, Feb. 19) to Portland (reading and six-word slam at Powell’s Books). Back on the home turf, we are blown away by and grateful for the brilliance […]