Tuesday, February 19, 2008

What's Your Six-Word Memoir?

Tonight I went to a refreshingly brief reading. The Six-Word Memoir Slam to celebrate the release of Not Quite What I Was Planning: The Six-Word Memoir from Writers Famous and Obscure. My friends Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, editors at Smith magazine, edited the book. It's most famously inspired by a six-word memoir by Ernest Hemingway, which some people call his greatest work: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Larry and Rachel managed to get about 80% of the crowd to participate--mainly by incenting them with free drink tickets and by throwing Nerds candy at them for reading! Great tactic! Duly noted for the next List Slam I put on (March 5 at Adaptive Path Interaction Design Firm in San Francisco, where you too can read your to-do list out loud in public).

But back to the six-word memoir: What's yours? It's important to remember that your six-word memoir will be always-changing. The six words that capture your life tonight may be outdated in a week, and that's okay, you can just write a new one then.

Here are the ones that occurred to me tonight (which I did not read aloud):

Started holiday, never stopped promoting it

Jeans too tight, wore them anyway

Too many blogs, not enough time

Merged words, met some quirky souls

And on and on. . .

Leave six-word memoirs in the comments and check them on Smith.

9 comments:

Kim said...

How funny and awesome -- I just had lunch with them at Google today! I should have known y'all were in the same great-literary-people circle!

My 6 words? managing other people's time - for now.

The Yankee Deb said...

I really get paid for this?

Anonymous said...

Lost: My last thirteen years. Please return.

reentown said...

lonely too busy to know it

farustar said...

circular life. knotted situations. bright smile.

Qkwan said...

blessed; loved; trying to be worthy

Diane Dehler said...

I recently did this six word memoir and enjoyed it.

*Coop* said...

daydreamer by day. procrastinator by night.

Anonymous said...

stared at him laughing at me