Urbis is one of our favorite creative communities. Like SMITH, Urbis is powered by writers, and gets bigger and better with each submission. While our thing is nonfiction personal narrative, Urbis’ community of creatives tend to focus on fiction, poetry, … Read more

If you dream of space travel, meeting Neil Armstrong would be ideal. If you’re more of a down-to-earth creature with a craze for magazines, Clay Felker’s your guy. Back in 2003, I was running around like a lunatic with a prototype and dream to start a reader-generated, … Read more

There’s no better part of making SMITH than witnessing what happens when we put out a call to our community for a challenge. Time and again, our readers/writers rock our world with their submissions to projects, contests, calls to convert a pregnancy story into a spot on a … Read more

We always like to spread the word when we hear about a new personal media project or cool writing opportunity, but I think it’s safe to say this is really something special. When Larry and I were in Philadelphia, we had the pleasure of drinking coffee with Andrew … Read more

Tim Hall teams up to tell his story with illustrator Rami Efal in the seventh installment of Next-Door Neighbor, the lyrical Dream Train. A lot of what we’ve showcased on NDN so far have been intense, voyeuristic, and occasionally … Read more

Last fall, I was running out of money in Edinburgh, Scotland and looking for work. I applied for a temporary Christmas job at Waterstone’s, the U.K.’s largest mega-chain bookstore. I filled out a ten page application and didn’t hear a thing—until I checked my mail about a month later. … Read more

The six-word memoir might be the “American haiku,” but lovelorn poets and purists can show their true-to-form 5/7/5 skills over at Heartbreak Haiku, a collective story project run by NYU grad student Zanna Marsh. “Your best pals are happy to listen to your rambling, romantic sob stories once, maybe … Read more

It’s not just about that. It’s about everything in life that matters, and Jessica Queller becomes more gorgeous with each honest word.

“Do not even think about writing a memoir until everyone is dead. It’s impossible to write about things without hurting people.” Read more

Carlin’s short, short life story can only be these seven words: Fuck. Shit. Piss. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.

My folks, to their considerable credit, took me to see George Carlin perform when I was, at best, 12 years old. Unforgettable. Later, at a stand-up comedy class I took, I performed his … Read more

I’m back, writing to you from my dungeon after a long and prosperous school year. I’ve spent my last few months torturing my fellow schoolmates with misplaced modifiers and surveying the professors with a keen eye, determining which ones (female and male) were wearing lace panties to class.

I’ve always … Read more

The sixth installment in Next-Door Neighbor, Halloween Ago, emerges from the mind and hand of Miss Lasko Gross, author and illustrator of Escape from “Special” from Fantographics and the upcoming A Mess Of Everything.

Read the … Read more

by Elizabeth Minkel
Last February, just as Not Quite What I Was Planning started climbing towards the bestseller list, a blogger named BookBabie seized on the internet potential of the six-word memoir. After all, the whole project has been an online venture from the start; the fact that anyone … Read more

Serious, diehard, ohmygodIlovedcamp camp people—you know who you are—are devoted storytellers. When we learned that Roger Bennett and Jules Shell’s new book, Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Meets Lord of the Flies, was a crowdsourced camp book with contributions from AJ Jacobs (an apology to a camp mate he … Read more

An excerpt from Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies, a big book of essays, photos, and braces edited by Roger Bennett and Jules Shell. Read more about the people behind Camp Camp here.

“We filed into the mess hall. … Read more

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads. Lynn Fox sends her husband Mike this Father’s Day gift, a beautiful essay she’s written our My Life So Far story project, SMITH’s home for readers’ memoirs-in-progress or personal essays. I can’t imagine a better tribute to the father of one’s children … Read more

Within the course of a few short weeks, we went from holding the soggiest six-word reading/slam to the sweatiest. Yet in many ways, Monday, June 9 at the Barnes & Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn this was the sweetest. At each reading, we always tell some “stories behind the … Read more

Sarah Manguso’s fourth book, The Two Kinds of Decay, recounts a harrowing nine-year bout with a rare and complicated blood disease. Her twenties are framed around hospital stays, surgeries, and blood transfusions, with brief moments of respite—concern with having sex before graduating from college, eating the best hamburger ever … Read more

One of the most popular questions in the year or so since we’ve been publishing A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is: So, when is the book coming out? We’re absolutely thrilled to say that Pantheon Books, the preeminent graphic novel … Read more

SMITH star writer Cole Kazdin will be throwing down her words as SMITH’s representative at Opium Magazine’s Literary Death Match, on Thursday, May 29, at Housing Works, 126 Crosby in NYC, 7pm. Warning: Literary Death Matches tend to get intense. And when Cole reads her work, the … Read more

We’ve just posted “Diaspora,” the newest chapter of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, the all-true serialized webcomic from Josh Neufeld and SMITH. I’m continually amazed at the detail Neufeld brings to each panel—the precision of expression … Read more

Our true story of six people who survived the hurricane rolls into its tenth chapter, “Something in the Water,” where the Doctor gives out shots at a Bourbon Street bar, Hamid and Mansell wade through the chest-high flood waters … Read more