Back to Blog
Six word memoires6/19/2023 Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated comes on the heels of TED’s The Science of Optimism: Why We’re Hard-Wired for Hope and offers an inadvertent yin to its yang.A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story-fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction-is shorter than many a story’s title: Elizabeth Kay Oh, 23, recently completed her bachelor’s at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. Minhee Bae, 21, is a senior at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. ![]() Melanie Jeanne Plank, 21, is a senior at the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, Ill. Georgia Chouteau, 19, is a sophomore at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Devin White, 19, attends Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., where he is a freshman. Liz Pendragon, 17, attends Union High School in Union, Mo., where she is a senior. ![]() Yoona Chun, 17, is a senior at Townsend Harris High School in Queens, N.Y. Courtney Drude, 16, attends Marriotts Ridge High School in Ellicott City, Md., where she is a junior. Rehana Ottalah, 13, is in eighth grade at J.D. Shawn Budlong, 13, is in seventh grade at the Thurgood Marshall School in Rockford, Ill. Kenn Doan, 12, is in sixth grade at West Stanly Middle School in Locust, N.C. Bullock School in Montclair, N.J., where she is in fifth grade. Sonia Rose Menken, 10, attends Charles H. Charlotte ‘Charley’ Berkenbile, 8, is in third grade at Florence Elementary School in Keller, Texas. The micro-memoirs are divided into four sections - grade school, high school, college, and graduate school - and touch, with equal parts wit and disarming candor, on everything from teenagers’ internal clocks to the escapism of Alice in Wonderland. The constraint fuels rather than limits our creativity. In the introduction, Smith speaks to the liberating quality of constraints:Īs an autobiographical challenge, the six-word limitation forces us to pinpoint who we are and what matters most - at least in the moment. The latest addition to the series, Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, comes from TEDBooks and collects dozens of visual six-word autobiographies from students between the ages of 8 and 35. ![]() The small experiment soon became a global phenomenon, producing a series of books and inspiring millions of people to contemplate the deepest complexities of existence through the simplicity of short-form minimalism. In 2006, Larry Smith presented a challenge to his community at SMITH Magazine: How would you tell your life’s story if you could only use six words? The question, inspired by the legend that Hemingway was once challenged to write an entire novel in just six words, spurred a flurry of responses - funny, heartbreaking, moving, somewhere between PostSecret and Félix Fénéon’s three-word reports.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |