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 6 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 The six words that capture your life tonight may be outdated in a week, and that’s okay, you can just write a new one then.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 quirkyalone-inspired six-word memoirs (or any old six-word memoir at all) in the comments and check them on Smith.
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