Quirkyalone

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 The six words that capture your life tonight may be outdated in a week, and that’s okay, you can just write a new one then.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.

Related posts:

1. Super-fun Reading
2. Berkeley List Slam Friday Nov. 16
3. Come to a New Year’s List Slam
4. Pics from Last Night’s Single State of the Union Reading
5. The Next List Slam: Bring Your To-Do List