I’m thrilled to announce the release of the eighth book in the Six-Word Memoir series, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, published with TED Books, a division of the TED Conference.

Quick links:
• Download the book
• View excerpt/slideshows in the Washington Post and Brain Pickings.
• Read a Q&A with Larry Smith on the TED blog

This book celebrates a number if firsts in the Six-Word Memoir world: our first book that’s entirely illustrated memoirs (and, always, the words and images are all the creation of the memoirist). It’s our first book solely by students, from grade school to grad school. It’s also our first ebook and cost just $2.99. You can get it or gift it on iTunes, Amazon or BN.com. To read it on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to download the free TED Books app as well.

Things Don’t Have to Be Complicated is also a reminder about all the different interpretations of the six-word prompt. In the Bronx, students in Leah Ruediger’s third-grade class offered raw works about their just-starting lives with memoirs such as, “My goal is to pass college.” Across town at Parsons New School of Design in Manhattan, 20 graduate students in Noel Claro’s illustration class created intricate mosaics of their own lives in progress coupled with precise language, with results such as “Martha Stewart: sans jail and Asian.” Six-Word Memoirs are a popular prompt in art as well as writing classrooms at Rawson Saunders School in Austin, Texas, a K-8 school exclusively for children with dyslexia, where memoirist Megan Schlab wrote, “Got lost in the clearance aisle.”

Take a look at an except from the book with a slideshow featuring many of the students’ work in The Washington Post, with a few of my thoughts alongside each memoir. And on the TED blog, I talk about the history of the Six-Word Memoir project and how it led to this wonderful new book.

Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, is a beautiful book. Memoir by memoir and click by click it remind me why I love this project and the many places it goes.