Six Word Memoirs | Larry Smith & Rachel Fershleiser | Talks at Google

Take it easy, everything will work out fine Relax but don't sleep or they might come for you. Stretch to meet me I'll be you Race all the sun don't let anything stand in your way don't hide behind the green grass don't let anyone rain on your parade. Now breathe, breathe out you'll be fine when the work is done don't mind the bend in your good luck, chum the crowd will disperse once their interest is gone Stretch, do me, me I'll meet you Race for the sun don't let anything stand in your way don't hide behind the green grass don't let anyone rain on your par on your parade don't feel bad it will work itself out in the end don't feel bad It's a fucked up world at best it's best to leave it.

To.

The rest of us Race all the sun don't let anything stand in your way no, not beyond the green grass don't let anyone rain don't let anyone rain on your brain on your brain. All right, so that's enough of that.

Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. We're very happy to have Larry Smith, Rachel Furstleiser and Tim Barkow speak with us about their new book today. Not quite what I was planning. Six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure. The premise of the book is that six words can tell a story. But the challenge is, as you can probably tell from the title, that it's being able to capture a life's worth of experience in six words, as the legend goes. And I'm sure Larry and Rachel can elaborate on this a little more. Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story consisting of six words, to which he responded with, and I quote, for sale baby shoes never worn. So that was the. That's kind of the cute, like, mythology behind the six word story idea. Their book, Larry and Rachel and Tim's book has enjoyed a great deal of popular attention from, among many other things, Vanity Fair. They were on K Fog and NPR recently and I just saw an article from the New Yorker on them in the Talk of the Town to give you a little bit of backstory. This book originated from Smith magazine, a site for storytelling of all forms and kinds with a focus on personal narrative. The guiding principle of Smith and six word memoirs is that everyone has a story to tell and then this is supposed to provide a place for them to tell that. And Larry and Rachel have invited us to share our own six word stories today. So either, hopefully you'll find this a Fun and informative way to share the six word memoir creative experience. And I also wanted to point out that if you go to six wordmemoir.com and tag your six word memoir with Google, we'll actually have a live insight thing going so that you can be submitting this now. And then we'll be sharing these during the presentation. So as a friendly reminder, if you have any questions or you want to share your six word memoir anytime during the talk, please use the microphone so that everyone in the VC locations and on YouTube can hear you. That would be great. But that being said, let's please welcome Larry, Rachel and Tim to Google today.

Thank you. Thank you so much. We really appreciate Tyler bringing us in here. We've had a lot of, we haven't had a lot of great attention for this book in the last month, but when I emailed Tyler a month, six weeks ago, we had pretty much no attention. He said, send me the book. Sounds pretty good. And then he said, come on in. So really appreciate that. Just believing in the idea and believing in the book. The first thing you should know is that you can completely not listen to this presentation on how he made this book and just think about your six word memoir, arguably more fun. And everything we'll say really comes down to it's really great to tell your story and six words is a great way to tell it. And so here's the story of how we made the book. You heard about the legend.

Right? So basically, does this work? Okay, so basically Hemingway was a legend in a bar. He had his six word story. It's something people have done in the writing world for a little while now, try to tell six word stories. But at Smith magazine, our whole idea is personal storytelling, autobiographical, tell your own story. And we're living in this totally voyeuristic age where everyone starts a blog every two seconds and television is reality and books are memoirs. So we just thought the logical evolution of the six word story is to tell your own six word story in the six word memoir. And we didn't really know what would happen.

On our year anniversary about a year, year and a half ago, we said, let's launch a six word challenge, a battle of brevity. And again, we didn't know what happened. We just put it out there. We're all about personal storytelling, personal narrative. And we've done different types of things. Comics basically, edited blogs. People keep diaries of their life and their crazy jobs, brushes with celebrities. But the six word challenge was a new idea for us, coming from the Hemingway myth or legend. And we didn't know what would happen. And in fact, what happened? Oh, I almost forgot. We made a really smart move or lucky move at the same time. Smith was getting going about a year old. I was obsessed with putting storytelling on other platforms, mobile being a natural way to tell stories. And we met up with the Twitter folks. This is like September 2006, maybe October. And it was this new idea, well, microblogging, that's kind of interesting. They were just kind of getting started and we really loved what they were up to and we were just grateful that they were sort of taken with what Smith was trying to do. And so Twitter's whole thing was 140 characters short micro blogging. And our thing was the curated community. So we said, well, let's launch the six word memoir contest with Twitter. And we were getting hundreds of six word memoirs in, but we would just Twitter out one a day. So every day like 2pm, one of us would like update our Twitter site and you would all get a six word memoir. Like a little coffee break at 2:00pm Kind of fun. But again, you don't really want like 206 word memoirs coming into your phone because that's annoying. Nor necessarily do you want to go to the site like Rachel and I do and read like thousands and thousands, because that's tough. But let's curate it, give you a little taste. And.

So basically when we started this, I think we knew that people would be funny, they would be clever, they would be pithy, they'd make jokes. We weren't prepared for the extent of the emotion. I mean, right away we got people saying how sad they were, how lonely they were, expressing their regrets and their darkest secrets. Things that I would have never attached my name to. People were totally happy to do.

I think one of the reasons that the six word memoir idea resonated with folks is because it is six words. You can write a little draft of your life in six words and you can rip it up, you can write 20, keep one. It's a non scary way to start. We're all looking at blank pages. Who doesn't want to tell the story of their life? But now you're staring at long New Yorker stories and best selling memoirs. I can't compete with that. But you can compete with six words. And we'll talk a little bit more about how in fact you're on the same level as some of the best selling writers of our time. And regret, regret was a big, was a big theme and in a way kind of surprising Rachel saying that we did think they would be kind of fun and funny and the idea was a little gimmicky. And when the range of emotion and poignancy and really how seriously folks took the six word challenge came in, it's really inspiring for us because, you know, we yell like crazy people. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a story. Like it's our mantra. In my sleep, I'm thinking this and I really believe that everyone has a story and everyone should have a place to tell it. And that is in fact why we started Smith. And they really did have a story to tell. And they said so much in six words.

And if you flip through the books that some of you are holding, there's actually an index in the back based on subject. So things like regret and fear, there's way more than that. There's also like French fries and masturbation. So whatever your particular interest for the.

Day is, you know, I'll tell a little story about the second one here. Fears, commitment, debt, attracts spouse, House, this woman who we do know, and most of the folks in the book, we've never met. I mean, we'll get to that, but we don't know most of them. They came in through the site, but Beth was doing a reading with us on Saturday at the Makeout Room, part of the Progressive Reading series. And right before the reading, she's freaking out. She comes up to me and she says, you know, I can't say my memoir. I'm like, well, okay, that's cool, but I wrote a new one, so sure. So she was having trouble with her marriage and her new memoir was I Do are not the Right Words. And afterwards she sent me an email apologizing, but she said, I felt, period, so much better. And of course I wasn't upset she changed it, but it just made me feel so inspired for what actually you can do with six words and just sort of telling your story and changing your story. And as your story changes with your.

Life, there's one in the book, a new memoir every five years. So feel free to reinvent whatever you've got on the card right there every five minutes.

And love, obviously, when you ask people to tell stories, love always comes up quite a bit. And with love, you get the whole range from the divorce. Thank God for Internet personals, to found true love after nine months, or that kind of regretful love. Never should have bought that ring. So we do see common themes. And as Rachel said, a lot of them are on the index. And yes, some of it's fries and some of it's mother. Uh oh, I became her mother. It's okay that I am her. Some life philosophies. We put a couple special up here for Google. You don't need to know that Jimmy Wells created Wikipedia. You all do. But it's just a great if you know that it's kind of like some of these things are almost like little private jokes. The memoir has to work on its own. But if you're reading this and you have the Brian Lamb created, you know, is the editor of Gizmodo or Jimmy Wells, it works a little better. So there's some fun little sneaky stuff in there. And then I will continue to laugh out loud when I read Darius Logan's Six Word Memoir. It remains funny. This is probably the 2000th time I've seen it.

But we try not to say it on the radio because we've gotten ourselves in trouble that way.

You can say crackhead on the radio though. One of our favorite, one of the most interesting six word memoirs is After Harvard Had Baby with Crackhead.

I wanted that for the title, but no one was having it right.

We met this woman later. It's a true story. She did go to Harvard. She did have a baby with a crackhead. He actually overdosed anyway, so. Well, it's true. Well, let's make a book.

So we got in all this content and we are an online magazine and everything we do is pretty web based, but something about having all this content made us think that it really should be a book. And I'm an old school book nerd. I come from a publishing background. And the thing about slapping it between covers, especially in this fun little format, is that you throw it in your bag, you take it on the bus, you put it on your coffee table, your toilet tank, you pass it around at a dinner party. And for the people in the book who'd never been published before, having their name in an actual book from a mainstream publisher that you could go to Barnes and Noble and pull out was a lifelong dream. And getting in touch with those contributors was a really big part of what made this all so incredible. When we decided to make the book, we started picking out a lot of our favorites and getting in touch with people and saying, we want to use your words in a book. Can you send us a picture, tell us more about it? And I've been emailing with about 800 people for over a year. I'm their shrink, their editor, their best friend, their mom. They asked me for apartment advice it's very strange, but we got to know more of their backstories too. And it's been really incredible because the six words can stand on its own or it can open up a door to a whole other story. And this woman, Joanna Brody, is one of my favorites because she said in this memoir, multiple miscarriages, Cousin will carry baby. A few weeks later she sent me an email saying, never mind. The surrogacy fell through. It's not going to happen. We're not going to have kids. Take it out of the book. And I asked her if I could keep it because it was a slice of her life at the time. And I just thought it told a nice story. And she said, ok. And she wrote this letter that's excerpted in the introduction about how life changes so quickly, you just never know. Well, little did Joanna know because a year later when I emailed her saying, okay, the book is coming out in stores now, she said, oh, by the way, I adopted a little boy. Oh. And then I got pregnant at 43. So Joanna now has two children under six months old. And her new six word memoir is Got Pregnant, Adopted Baby, Instant family, also known as Two Kids under six Months. Huh.

I don't know how many of you wake up every day and make coffee for your partner, your spouse or whatever. I certainly do. And I think this will be my lot in life for a long time. So when I saw Zach Nelson's six Word memoir, I Still Make Coffee for Two, really hit me because one day, if I wasn't making coffee for two, I pictured Zach as an older man, his wife passed on. You kind of put yourself in his head. And a lot of what's really fun about the book is that you can create your own narrative, you can create your own backstory. So I was sure Zach Nelson was 85. He was sweet. He makes coffee for two. When Rachel got in touch with Zach and he sent in this original art which appears in the book, and all the art in the book comes from the contributors. We learned that he was a 27 year old hipster, lives in Seattle, girlfriend left him, he's fine.

And he actually, I've never met him, we've only emailed. But for my birthday he sent me an illustration in the style of my six word memoir.

He's looking to make coffee for two again. I think. Is there one more? Great. There's so many great backstories. And what we're doing on the site is we're trying to tell a backstory a day.

We're Ending up at one.

Well, you know, we're doing our best. We're telling a backstory a day of some of the I'm getting to Summer backstory day of some of the memoirs. Who we got to know a guy named Billy Serr's six word memoir is Anything is Possible with an extension cord. Great, right? But he works at Monster. Monster. That's kind of fun. Not monster.com, but monster. Summer Grimes, our favorite backstory I'm going to pass to Rachel.

Summer Grimes sent in the six word memoir. Not quite what I was planning. We thought it was kind of all encompassing and a good theme on life, so we took it for the title. And then I started emailing her. Dear Summer, we love your entry. We'd like to choose it for our book. Nothing. Never Wrote Back to me. Never Wrote Back to Me. We had the original contest, it ended. We had a winner for that one, which was Barrister Barista, what's the Diff Mom? Which was also funny, but not so much a book title. So that girl won an ipod. Summer just got to title the book and I'm bugging her and I'm bugging her and she's never answering me. Finally, I get an email from her. She thought it was a scam. She thought it was spam. She thought it was like one of these things you get in high school where like your poem is selected for a book and then you have to buy like a $300 leather bound edition. And one day she sees it on Amazon.com and she's like, oh, I wrote that, so I guess it must be real. So she emails us back and she's so excited and she's so sorry she ignored us. So she's our friend now. She's 24, she lives in Minnesota, and she flew into New York for our launch party. She got her picture taken for the paper, and she was in the New Yorker, and we did manage to give her that ipod.

So we were dramatically gave her an ipod and we inscribed not quite what I was planning on it. So that was really fun. It was just so great to see Summer come to New York and accidentally be part of this wonderful project. It just meant so much to her and really to us. Meanwhile, while Rachel was Getting to know 832 memoirists and being their psychiatrist, I was chasing celebrities a little bit. And I was chasing them for a couple of reasons. One part of the whole mission of Smith is to blend the professional and the amateur on the site, especially in a section called Memoirville, which Rachel oversees. You'll see excerpts from some of the best selling memoirists you know of the day to folks who it's the first time they've ever written for a place. An 85 year old guy named Norman. What's that?

Sorry, go ahead.

Norman Basel wrote something called we have a section called My life so far. He sent in his memoir in progress about being a prisoner of war and a few months later he got a book deal. That's a special case. Doesn't always happen, but that's the thing. Best selling memoirist, first time writer. All part of the mission. Same deal for the book. Going back to the contest, one of the first things I did was email a couple of friends I've just known from being around publishing for a long time. And I emailed Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love. And I think she came in here to talk to you guys and I said, hey Liz, you know I've asked you for years to write for me. Always offering big money and stuff and you're always too busy. But why don't we have your six word memoir for our contest? It'd be kind of cool to like, you're up there and then somebody who's never written before is up there and you're like aspirational for them. And she sent me a note. First she said, running to catch a plane in Indonesia. And she's like, wait, that's seven words. Then she said, okay, my official six entry to the six word memoir challenge is to be read in a Tarzan yet girlish like voice. Me see world mi write stories. That's very much the Liz Gilbert story. Mario Batali. I sent him an email and I figured either I'd hear back from him quickly or never. Because he's a real intense guy. I know him a little bit. And at two in the morning an email comes in with seven six word memoirs, including Built it Up, Sold it for profit, Exalted the wops, Dogged the frogs. But the one we put in the book, which was his first of seven, was brought it to a boil often. So, you know, if you know the whole Molto Mario thing, there's been thousands and thousands of words written about him, but brought it to a bill often is really the essence of who he is. And I think you see that across the whole book.

Yeah, it's just been really fun to say to people whether in the contest or in the book. Like, here's Dave Egger's six word memoir. Everybody buys his books now. Can we have yours? We'll put it right there. Next to it. And the book's really a grab bag like that. Another thing that we did was not everyone in the book is like Stephen Colbert famous or as obscure as say, us. There's a lot of people in between who they've written a book or two, they've put out an album or two, some comic book artists, some web people who, like my friends, will be like, oh my God, you got him. And I'll be like, huh, who's that?

It's usually the guy from the Fountains of Wayne.

Right? Well, that's what I was going to say. So there are people like that. We happen to be from like indie bands, like I, from Fountains of Wayne. Like I think it's cool that he's in there. My friends think that it's cool that he's in here. My mom's never heard of him, but. But she can still read his six word memoir and relate to what he has to say.

We get a little excited about the idea.

And we're New Yorkers.

One of the most exciting parts of putting this book out, going from web to print on this idea, was that we had 832 authors. It was a true collaborative effort.

And as far as I know, we're the only book with that many contributors who credits each one by name and keeps them all involved in the process. Like Post Secret was obviously written by hundreds of people, but nobody knows who they are anymore. So keeping all these people involved has been kind of exhausting, but totally worth it. One of the things we said to the publisher when we were very first making the deal, I mean, it's a tiny little book deal, but we needed a copy for every contributor. And you know, they don't love to give away 800 books, but it was so important to us just to keep everyone involved. And we actually sent it out with sort of a self promotion kit. And everybody got like some signs and some stickers to put up and an iron on sheet to make their own T shirts. And we told them sort of how to talk to their local bookstores. So there's really a national team, international actually. One's in Romania, an international team of six word memoirists spreading the word. And they started to take on their own projects too. Like this illustration here we found on someone's blog and we don't know her name or the girlfriend's name, so we don't actually know what the memoir is, but she wrote a blog about the day that her girlfriend's book came in the mail. And that's like the jiffy Pack. We sent it in and she illustrated it. We've seen YouTube videos people made for six word memoirs from their families. And we have a contributor named Frank Gilroy who started a contributor registry. So if you. There's a link on our site, but it's really on his site. He built it. If you want to know more about anybody in here, there's links to the. The blogs of as many people as he was able to compile. We would have loved to do it, we just didn't have the time. And he just ran with it. They're introducing themselves to each other on Facebook. People keep going up to each other. Oh, hey, I'm Jason. Page 132. It's happening at parties and also online. I've had to memorize my page because that seems to have become the way people talk about it.

So it sort of became this accidentally crowdsourced book for us. And you know, there's when I saw a blog by a guy named Jace whose six word memoir is, to make a long story short, who Jay seems to be showing up everywhere. New York, party, LA party. And the first thing he said was, our book is out. And it makes us feel so good because it is our book. It's 832 people's book. And it's also been really, really great. The book is 832 Life Stories, Love, sex, gay, geek, drama, pain, sorrow, happiness, laughter. And we love the long memoirs. But you're getting so many different stories. You flip through. You get a whole wild range of emotions. When I look at the back end of Smith where they come in every day, I kind of wake up and before I'm even caffeinated, I click through some of my favorites because we feature 10 new ones a day on the site. And it's a lot to kind of take in before the coffee's kicked in. And the book very much is that way. And the response to it in the press has been that same range. For example, we've been reviewed in Penthouse and. Oh, we've been reviewed in Penthouse and Men's Journal and you're the New Yorker now. But I don't know any other book that's been reviewed both in Penthouse and what Rachel was about to say.

My very favorite press we've ever gotten was this column written by a minister in Canada. He's a reverend. And you know, we like to think there's something for everyone in this book. And he went and wrote a column asking the question, in all genuine sincerity, what would Jesus do if he were asked to write a six word memoir and this guy went on to suggest some six word memoirs for Jesus. I felt audacious writing them for Hillary and Obama, but I'm not as close to the big guy as he is. So then he went on to suggest to his faithful readers, to his congregation that they should use the six word memoir form to get at the essence of their faith. So that was just something totally different for us.

And this idea up here is that the book came out, the galley got sent around to a lot of daily papers, you know, months ago, and you're not really supposed to review the book until it's supposed to come out. But the Atlantic Journal Constitution just the reviewer said, oh, you know, I love this book. I'm not supposed to review it. But hey, I'm just going to give you a few examples from the book and leave your six word memoir in our comments and I'll send my book to my favorite one. And they broke a comment's record. And for us, we're a storytelling community. And yes, we were really pleasantly surprised by the reaction on our site, but folks do come to read and tell stories. They come to Smith magazine. So when we were at the Atlantic Journal Constitution and the the religious paper and we were on npr and a few minutes into this segment, Neal Conan says, my God, we put the challenge up on npr.org just 40 minutes ago and we have 300 responses. And I'm like, Neil, that's what I'm talking about. And it just gets beyond the storytelling community. There is a little something for everyone.

And a big thing that we like to talk about too is just getting people started. If you say to people, tell us your life story, they don't know that they have one, but they're going to go, oh, I'm not a writer, I don't have the time, I don't know what to say. And you give them these six words constraints, and it's a really easy way to get started. It just opens it up to everyone. And this is actually a six word memoir that you just clicked away from that. We got way after the book, which came into the site the other day, but wanted to write but feared failure. Well, if that was her life story, she just changed it because she just put it up on our site. And it's really been a sort of icebreaker for a lot of people. I know you're all writing them right now.

No, I heard from a friend that she said, look out for my mother. She's been entering the New Yorker. Caption contest every week. And you know, not that many people can win that. But you go to smithmag.net, you upload your sixth word memoir, it's there, may or may not be featured, might not be mentioned in a Google presentation or npr, but it's there, you know, it's published. It's the. We curate the community by pointing out our favorites, but we kind of do we let it in. Everybody in, Everybody into the barbecue. So where are we here? So with the success of the six word memoir project and the book Awesome, a lot of people are coming to the site. And so what happens then? Server problems. So I turned to Tim here, who by the way, made that wonderful video in the beginning one lost weekend. He's like, hey man, made a video and it's been a great thing for the site. What do we do? So he's like, well, you know, we gotta go, we gotta go offline for an hour or we're switch servers. So okay, fine, I'm freaking out. It's like Sunday afternoon. Like, it's really fine to be offline for an hour, as it turns out. But when we come back live again, I immediately go back to the back end to see sort of what's happened, you know, who submitted what. And one of the first ones was down for maintenance. Be back soon. Which is a great six word life story and certainly the story that we just lived through. And so the other hope is that on the site we do have all sorts of storytelling ways to tell stories. We have web comics, we have a really wonderful web comic about six people escaped and survived Katrina. Real people, their story. We have a woman who's keeping a diary of being a working dominatrix in New York City. So we do hope that the six words was this great way to have lots of folks tell their story.

It's a gateway drug, really.

We hope it's a gateway drug to, you know, different types of storytelling, longer storytelling. The big dream of what we're trying to do is be a popular storytelling community using all the awesome tools we have today. Video, audio, slideshows, photos, blogs, Twitter, the whole thing. And you know, we're kind of in. It's the beginning of the beginning for us, I think. And so what have we learned? Arguably, arguably we've learned what we always knew, which is that storytelling really is a fundamental part of who we are. I always say that what we want Smith magazine to be is a barbecue, a backyard barbecue. Because what do you do? There you go. And you tell stories. Oh yeah, that guy over there, maybe he's a little bit better known and that guy's not. And you come home and you repeat some of the best stories and some of them change a little bit in the translation. You forget a lot of them, but you remember some and you sort of.

Swap them and that giving people parameters is a good way to get them started.

A blank page is very scary. A blank page with a six word limit is not quite as scary. Editors still matter. We do know that if we handed you a book with 9 million six word memoirs or said the only way you can read the memoirs is the site, that would not be as appealing to some people.

Let's face it, not everything user generated out there is so compelling to read. So for user generated but professionally edited, we find we get a much better result.

And books are fun. I watch as I see the book picked up off my coffee table or let's face it, bathroom. And you know, people love it. They start telling stories, they start swapping six word memoirs. I've told this story many times. Rachel's sick of it. But a really great moment for me was the book had just come out and of course, you know, I fedexed it to my mom because, you know, she's my mom and she was babysitting my nephews. And I got a call, Uncle Larry, it's Zach. And he said, I wrote a six word memoir for pop up memory loss. What was I thinking? Dude's 11.

And there seems to be this sort of myth that publishing is dying and that it's books or the web and that there's no cross pollination there. And we just really believe in the ability for both to be important and for both to interact with one another.

Number four, when in doubt, make a video. Tim Barko. The video was great. It really, really almost explained the idea better than anything. You just saw them rolling in. You can sit back and let the stories come to you because it sounds.

Like maybe it's just a cute idea. And that really gave people the idea that it could really be more interesting than you think, you know. And Tim did it with pictures or Creative Commons from Flickr. The song we licensed off Pump audio. So it was just like this fun little webby collaborative thing.

Celebrities, they wrote some great six word memoirs. We didn't chase Britney Spears, we chased Richard Ford and Stephen Colbert. You know, like frankly are kind of celebrities. And like Joan, well, we'll get to Joan. And you know, it's the playing field at Smith and really the web as much as it's this like, complicated, three dimensional, nine dimensional platform. It can be very level, and that's what we want to do. At Smith, you're sitting Mario Batali next to John Bettencourt, who tells us, one tooth, one cavity. Life's cruel. A little celebrity goes a long way, but also it kind of levels the playing field in a way that I think we forget in this heightened celebrity culture. And the other thing, and probably the most important thing I've learned in the last year and a half is that Joan Rivers is a very funny lady. When I was chasing celebrities, I asked a friend of mine who had interviewed Joan if he could ask Joan for a six word memoir. About 20 minutes later, I got an email. This is Joan's six word memoir. Furious. Had same idea for seven, you know, which is six words. And I replied, really? No, dude, I'm kidding. Joan was kidding. So I needed more sleep. So the real one came in, which was liars. Hysterectomies. Hysterectomy didn't improve sex life.

So on that note of surgery, we're gonna do a little bit of a reading. And I know that you people are reticent to do some class participation. So I thought we'd start out if you guys want to yell out some numbers between 1 and 220, and we'll just read them off as quick as we can to get things started, and then I'll come at you with candy. So just go. Someone go. Just yell a number.

Got it. 168. Oh, this is a good one.

Just go.

Full of tequila and bad ideas.

Number 12. Oh, I'm on page 12. Okay, how about I did ask to live backwards.

Rachel's is be speckled, be sneakers red and ran around spectacled, not bespeckled.

That's entirely different numbers. Come on, people.

32. 32. Happiness is a warm salami sandwich.

Tombstone won't say had health insurance.

So question and answer.

Oh, yeah. Anybody got questions? I'm told that you'll sit there for 30 seconds, but then someone will have a question. Escapees.

Well, the number one question is, how did you get Stephen Colbert? And the answer is begging. I probably asked five different people who were one degree away from Colbert, and finally one of them said, oh, yeah, he loves the idea. Here you go.

So last time we did this, we just went around the audience and had everybody read theirs. And I brought really good candy. But do they need to be on the mic? Oh, yeah, I have a mic. Right, cool. Well, I know you all have one on the card. Let's just read them real quick and pass the mic around. If you really don't want to, you can pass it again. But I've got nerves.

Charles is a contributor. We didn't know until just a couple days ago that he worked at Google, so that was kind of a fun happenstance.

Sure, I have to milk this, right?

I do.

On the playground alone 1970 today.

Well, one of the things about the site is you actually get to submit your six word memoir quietly by yourself.

But we might put it in a book.

Your co workers don't see you, but you know you got one. Live Laugh, Learn, Love, party.

Excellent. Come have some candy. Someone else?

I'll do it for candy. I'm not that kind of girl. Anyone else? I see a contributor in the back.

I need a copy of the book. I'm on the black page. That's all I know. I always get the order wrong. All right. I think it's writing the other way. It's Blogging is easy. Writing is hard.

That is certainly one a lot of people relate to.

Terrible. Catch. Could be the next one.

But you know, do think about it. Go to the site and submit it there@smithmag.net or 64memoirs.com and I promise you throw the idea out at a dinner party. Hand him the book instead of your next $12 bottle of wine. It's a really fun conversation start. And that's what we're really trying to do at Smith. Just get the conversation going. Tell stories. Be, you know, be a part of the barbecue conversation.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.