What is SMITH?
SMITH Magazine launched on January 6, 2006, National Smith Day, as a home for storytelling of all forms and kinds, with a focus on personal narrative. Whether a professional or unpublished writer, we believe everyone has a story, and everyone should have a place to tell it. Our editorial is bottom up, aspirational, populist, and participatory. SMITH is our stories, our history, our friends, our moments, our lives. We believe everyone has a story. Everyone is a SMITH.

Do I submit a story to an editor or can I just post my story on the site?
Your stories find their way to SMITH in two ways.
1. Directly from anyone who is registered user (signup takes about 15 seconds). Registered users can submit to any of our story projects, including six-word memoirs, Brushes with fame, Memoirs in progress, My ex, and The PopuList, a weekly question that readers answer in 100 words or less.
2. By submitting to editors, who both assign stories and accept stories over the transom. These stories can be found in our Obsessions section (which covers topics such as weird jobs, war, the ever-popular beautiful pregnant women series, and photo essays) and Memoirville (excerpts and interviews from published memoirists).

Who owns the copyright to the stories I submit on SMITH?
You do and we do. By registering on SMITH, you agree to our Terms of service, which states:

Users retain their copyrights to all submitted works.

All user submissions to SMITH are governed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This means visitors are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the submitted work with attribution, for non-commercial purposes only, and cannot make derivative works from the submitted work.

In addition, users grant SMITH a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license to use the submitted work for promotional, commercial and non-commercial purposes, such as advertisements, books, and other products.

I see you have all these different story projects. Can I suggest a story project?
Yes. The current slate of story projects are all topics we’ve found people respond to with wonderful personal stories.The plan is to grow the range of story projects over time. If you think you’ve got a topic with legs, and would potentially like to be that project’s editor, email us at news AT smithmag DOT com.

Do you plan on publishing a print version of SMITH?
We’d like to enable you to take SMITH to the beach and the bathroom, and one day you might. However, we’re currently focusing on SMITH online, as well as putting out books, such as Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing) NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: Six-Word Memoirs By Writers Famous & Obscure (Harper Perennial). Click here if you’re the type of person who would get a kick out of reading about SMITH Mag’s journey from print prototype to happily humming web site.