See a photo of Larry his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, a Part 2Part 3.

Q&A with Larry, Questions 6 and 7

Q: Can you describe some highlights of SMITH’s evolution since 2006? What aspect of its growth makes you most proud?

A: When I launched the site in 2006, the idea was really as a web magazine with a user-generated component, and by the end of the first year it evolved into a storytelling community. The role of the editors became to feature (or curate) some of the content, as well as launch the occasional top-down, editor-driven projects (such as our webcomics). If I walked into the concept of SMITH, and its tagline, “Everyone has a story,” thinking like an editor embracing the web, now I’m clearly a guy who runs a community who happens to have some editorial expertise. Which is a long way of saying: I didn’t set out to be a community builder, but I love it. And the launch of the Six-Word Memoir project was a massive community-building catalyst.

Week after week, people got in touch with us directly about how much the form meant to them, and how they’ve used it for their own projects and purposed. A woman named Abby sent us Six-Word Memoirs from her teen patients at a psychiatric hospital in Forest Park, IL. Jolene, a nurse in Oakland, CA, wrote to tell us this story about a patient with Leukemia:

“I was taking care of this 21 yr old guy who has had Leukemia since he’s been 8 yrs old. He’s pretty debilitated, is wasting away right now—a very sad case. I brought in your book and asked him to come up w/ his own 6-word memoir. He thought about it for about 2 minutes (mind you before that I could barely get him to engage w/ me, he was extremely depressed as you can imagine). He then just blurted out: ‘Fat man eats pie then farts.’ It’s a metaphor for life you see, we indulge ourselves then we die.”

This summer we just launched a Six-Word Memoir project with the youth suicide org, TWLOHA.org. (I blogged about how that came about.]. The hope is that after we launch the projects online, later we will make Six-Word Memoir books, by and for their communities. In my in-box right now is a note from someone from a site called Babyheart.org about partnering on a six-word memoirs project about kids with CHD (congenital heart disease). And, of course, from kindergarten to grad school, teachers around the world find six-word memoir to be an excellent writing prompt. All these offshoots and outgrowths and collaborations feel good. It feels like we’re living up to one of SMITH Mag’s core beliefs: to make and facilitate better media, not simply more media.

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: Don’t be afraid to start. From there, I offer four words of wisdom that is a part of my philosophy about “just starting”: write drunk, editor sober. Whether you’re writing a letter, a report for work, or the story of your life, in six words or 60,000, put the words down. Don’t obsess over them, just effusively spill them down onto the page. Then edit. And when you think you’re finished cut another 10 percent of the text.