Eight Chosen Heebish Six-Word Memoirs
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[/caption] This Hanukkah, SMITH teamed-up with Heeb Magazine, to choose a different Six-Word Memoir on The Jewish Life winner each night, a contest. Each of the eight winning scribes will get a free copy of our upcoming book, Oy! Only Six? Why Not More? Six Words on the Jewish Life, which will be available this March.
Here are the eight winners, as chosen each crazy night by Heeb editors, in chronological order:
"We bonded over our deviated septums." - Alessandra Rizzotti
"I've got more complaints than Portnoy." - David Wolkin
"I have a fetish for altakockers." - AmySohn
"Bar mitzvah video used for blackmail." - Jon Papernick
"Shortened my name and my nose." - George Kaplan
"Smash the idols, mend the world." - j2232554
"Latkethon at my mother's gynecologist's home." - PaleOfSettlement
"A pronounced weakness for smoked fish." - StringJuggler
We put the names of each winner into a shtreimel and randomly pulled one out to receive a bonus, the Six-Word Memoir Game. And the game recipient is David Wolkin. In addition to being a brilliant short-form writer, we've learned that Wolkin is executive director of Limmud NY, a multi-day conference-meets-festival celebrating Jewish life.
Heeb and SMITH are mishpucha by way of our comics-editor-in-common, Jeff Newelt, aka JahFurry. His six words on the Jewish life, of course, "Hid comics inside Hebrew School textbooks."
Five Years of Six Words
A message from a site called Twitter Birthday tweeted to me, naturally, reminded me that SMITH Mag has been on Twitter since November 16, 2006. What was going on back then? I had joined this oddball little site in anticipation of running a one-month contest called "What's your Six-Word Memoir?" in collaboration with some guys I had met at a tech conference. Their company was called Twittr (no "e" back then) and they also had a fondness for the short form.
And so it was that just before Thanksgiving in 2006, SMITH’s team, consisting of co-founder, Tim Barkow, and senior editor, 
Rachel Fershleiser (pictured here at our book launch party with Summer Grimes, whose six-worder, "Not quite what I was planning," became the book's title and featured in a story in The New Yorker), and I quietly tossed out a challenge to the SMITH Magazine community: "How would you describe your life in exactly six words?" Our challenge was a personal twist on the legendary Hemingway six-word novel ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") which we dubbed the Six-Word Memoir. (Read more about what happened at the Thanksgiving table in last year's anniversary post.)