Guest post by Bailey Kennedy, www.paperbackgirl.com

On January 24, in conjunction with SMITH Magazine‘s Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, the 92nd Street Y, hosted an evening dedicated to the six-word memoir project with a focus on New York, The Big Apple in Six Words, a collection in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway’s legendary six word story - “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The thought of boiling down a person’s life experiences into a six word memoir seems almost laughably restrictive, but most of the speakers at the event acknowledged that the rigid format was freeing in a way. A blank piece of paper doesn’t look so intimidating if your starting point is six words.

Smith and Fershleiser recounted their experiences culling together the memoirs to include in the book and then turned the floor over to the panel of memoirists consisting of A.J. Jacobs, author of The Guinea Pig Diaries, Amy Sohn, writer of Prospect Park West, and Ben Yagoda, writer of the recently released Memoir: a History.

Following the panel discussion, contest winners and contributors, including former Page Six gossip scribe Corynne Steindler and comedian Julia Segal, were invited up to the microphone to read their memoirs. The tone of the memoirs varied from sardonic ("I hope it’s not a tapeworm") to jarringly honest ("Born a boy; raised a girl") while others lamented change in New York ("Brooklyn was better before everyone came"). Despite the ample inspiration, the best I can come up with for myself is “Good taste, bad men; what happened?” and “Memoirists [a real word, turns out].”

To learn more, visit the SMITH Magazine website where you can read hundreds of six word memoirs and contribute your own.

Related: Flavorwire recaps the event and compares The Big Apple in Six Words to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”

Upcoming: Wallace Shawn with Anthony Arnove: Thoughts On Creativity on Feb 1

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