![]() Hey, that's also six words! For WORDMASTER, I'm Adam Phillips.Have you heard of six-word memoirs? Since the project debuted in 2006, one million adults and teens have shared their six-word stories. If you'd like your six-word memoir to be considered, send it to us at You never know until you try. They are co-editors of Not Quite What I Was Planning, a collection of six-word memoirs readers submitted to them online, at .īy the way, Larry and Rachel are offering Wordmaster listeners five slots in their next volume. ![]() I've been talking today with Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser of Smith Magazine. If you are afraid to write, if your English isn't so good, it's a way to start, it's a way to learn, and it's a way to have fun." RACHEL FERSHLEISER: "This is a great way to get going with using words. A blank page that is filled with six words is not scary. LARRY SMITH: "A blank page is very scary when you are writing your memoir or your autobiography. Writing their memoirs has been a real beginning for many of the contributors, many of them were really wary about writing. So I love that, with the one word thumb, she has actually communicated a whole lifestyle." And when you settle down and have babies, you are not traveling by thumb anymore. But if you think about that image of hitchhiking, of sticking your thumb out in the middle of the road and getting picked up and going who knows where, it's such an image of youth and freedom. Now thumb, of course, the word just really means a digit on your hand. One of my favorite six word memoirs is by Karen Franklin: Trains. RACHEL FERSHLEISER: "It's a beautiful little life cycle. Hair is a common theme in the six-word memoir book. But people respond to it and, most importantly, it's true to who I am." It's kind of playful, kind of fun, no great masterful prose. LARRY SMITH: "My own six-word memoir is quite simple: Big hair, big heart, big hurry. After meeting you, Rachel, I'd say that your own contribution - 'Bespectacled, besneakered, read and ran around' - describes you pretty well. That was a level of power I wasn't intending to get."ĪP: "I know your own six-word memoirs are in the book. Ronald Zalewsky says: Was father, boys died, still sad. "And I burst into tears looking through the contest entries. So many of them are about regret, about sadness, about loneliness, about mistakes that you've made. And these memoirs are so diverse and so honest. But I don't think we really understood how deep they'd be able to go. RACHEL FERSHLEISER: "When we put the challenge out there - and we didn't really know what we'd get back - we thought people would be funny they would be clever they would be pithy. That tells a whole story about a moment in his life and about a life regret." His six-word memoir: Never should have have bought that ring. For example: Paul Bellows - like most of our contributors, an unknown person that came through our site. And that's the thing about the six-word memoir form: you really can look at a specific moment that may have affected your whole life. LARRY SMITH: "He's saying you know, I got a bad deal, life is cruel. And that takes one tiny aspect of a person's life and expands it to say more than that one tiny detail might say. On the other hand, you can have something like John Bettencourt's six-memoir: One tooth. So if you look at the title of the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning - which was a six-word memoir - that can pretty much apply to a whole life and almost anyone's life." Some people choose to encompass everything. And that's why this six-word form is so wonderful, because it helps you distill what's really important. RACHEL FERSHLEISER: "A memoir is any story that encapsulates your life, what you remember, what's important to you. Now, 832 of those little gems have been collected into a book called "Not Quite What I Was Planning." Our guests today, Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith, both of Smith Magazine, co-edited the volume, which is the first of several planned.įirst, tell me Rachel, what is your working definition of a memoir? In late 2006, journal editors invited readers to send in their own six-word creations. They are among the more than fifteen thousand six-word memoirs submitted to Smith Magazine, an online journal devoted to storytelling. The answer is: they are all self-contained memoirs, and they each contain just six words. See if you can identify what these three sentences have in common: ![]() I'm Adam Phillips, sitting in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble.
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