![]() And I also didn’t expect to get so many impassioned notes from teachers lobbying for their students’ work to make it into the book.Ĭhildhood is a confusing time. I was a little surprised by how good some of the artwork was, but I probably shouldn’t have been. I mean, does the little girl who wrote the memoir that said “Tried surfing on a calm day” even know she’s a Zen master? Now I absolutely expect brilliance and have seen it first hand at school across the country and every day on the site. I was surprised by the depth of feeling and the angst and the life lessons that they may not have even realized they were sharing. What surprised you about the responses of the students? Click the image to see The Washington Post‘s slideshow. We’ll be featuring many more memoirs not found in the book at /school, where teachers can also download our free teachers’ guides.įrom Shawn Budlong, a seventh grader at the Thurgood Marshall School in Rockford, Ill. The end result isn’t necessary “the best” but a selection that I hope offers a wide range of ages, themes, ideas and forms of self-expression. There’s one part I don’t like about my job: telling people-of any age-that they haven’t been chosen for the book. We had around 2,000 submissions, often from entire classrooms.īetween the 60 individual memoirs you see in the book, and the classroom slideshows (in which we feature all the work the teachers sent in) we have fewer than 200 in the book. So when TED approached me and asked, ‘What’s the Six-Word Memoir book you’re most jazzed to do?,’ it was an easy answer: a book that’s a celebration of the artful works of students and, I hope, an even more effective catalyst for educators everywhere. Whether a Six-Word Memoir takes the form of just words, or words and images, video, or 3-D collage, the constraint fuels rather than inhibits creativity. One grade-school teacher in New Jersey had her students create six-word “memory boxes.” At Parsons School of Design, illustrated Six-Word Memoirs are a regular assignment. It was used in English and art classes alike. Soon after the Six-Word Memoir project took off I began hearing from teachers who were adapting Six-Word Memoirs in their classroom, from grade schools in the Bronx to Yale Law School. Why add the art?Īs with most of what happens in a passionate community, I took the lead of the people in it. This is the first illustrated memoir you’ve done. ![]() Chef Mario Batali certainly did when he wrote, “Brought it to a boil often.” Others try to capture one aspect of their life such as, “According to Facebook we broke up” or “Mom’s Alzheimer’s: she forgets, I remember.” At its core, Six-Word Memoir projects takes a basic human need-self-expression-and makes it accessible, easy and often quite addictive.įrom Elizabeth Mappus, a junior at the Academic Magnet High School in North Charleston, S.C. Think of it as the title of your autobiography or epitaph on your tombstone. Those six words can be an attempt to sum up your whole life. ![]() The idea is as simple as it sounds: tell the story of your life in exactly six words. So in November 2006, we partnered with a little-known company called Twitter for what was then supposed to be a one-month contest to win an iPod. Others had played with the idea of the six-word story form before, but I and my storytelling community, SMITH Magazine, re-imagined it. He wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I was inspired by that. There’s a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. How did the idea for Six-Word emoirs come about? So below, we asked Larry Smith all about how Six-Word Memoirs came to be. Today, the Washington Post features a slideshow of just a few of the mini-memoirs and images from the book. The result is the evocative and often moving Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs By Students Making Sense of the World. Smith put out the call for students - ranging from grade school to graduate school - to contribute illustrated Six-Word Memoirs. He has just published his latest edition as a TED Book, and added a special twist: artwork. Think you can summarize it into a half-dozen carefully crafted words? Larry Smith thinks you can, and created the popular ‘ Six-Word Memoir‘ project, that challenges contributors to make us pause, reflect and even laugh. Pause for a moment and imagine the grand, confusing and ultimately exhilarating drama that is the sweep of your life.
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