Six Words Turns 17 ... and Stanley Turns Six

Or: How one beautiful email helped me get to the heart of the matter

It feels impossible to get my head around the journey on what is now the 17th anniversary of Six-Word Memoirs. Where should we begin?

The answer? Well, it depends on who’s asking. If the audience is a group of educators, then I dig into how teachers have embraced the six word format as a catalyst for writing and self-expression in classrooms. If I’m talking about corporate storytelling, then I dive into the ways the six word form is a tool for mission building and team bonding at the workplace. If the desired outcome is for an individual or audience to be impressed with my thought leadership on the power of storytelling, then I emphasize (humbly, of course!) that the Six-Word Memoir Project is a part of the modern storytelling movement alongside The Moth, This American Life, StoryCorps, early Twitter, and others — a movement that changed the way people engage with personal narratives.

There are so many aspects of Six-Word Memoirs, and as the 17th anniversary approached, I was thinking about all this and what I wanted to say in this space when I received an email from Nancy Jorgensen, writing from Waukesha, Wisconsin:

“I’m one of the contributors to the Six-Word Memoir site and my grandson Stanley turned 6 yesterday. For his birthday, my daughter and I collected Six-Word Memoirs from family and friends, including photos and backstories, and compiled a book for him. He loves it and is very particular about who can touch it!”

Nancy included a PDF of the book, the cover of which I’m sharing with the family’s permission.

This book is everything to me because it is a microcosm of the story of six words that I most love to tell: Six-Word Memoirs is a way to get to the heart of the matter. That story began with my first tweet in November 2006, “Can you describe your life in six words,” thirty-three characters of text that went viral. The story continued with SixWordMemoirs.com where, over the years, hundreds of thousands of community members have shared millions of stories about life, work, friends, family, faith, and more. The format’s popularity also led to a bestselling series of ten books on immigration, family, work, faith, teen life, and it provided me with the opportunity to publish more than 7,000 first-time writers alongside names you know like Stephen Colbert, Taylor Swift, Aziz Ansari, Jennifer Egan, Amy Schumer, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

But one of the names you don’t know is Jo Ann Daniels (below) who has written more than 4,600 Six-Word Memoirs. When Alex Allison, a reporter for the Fort Worth Report in Texas, wrote a feature about 2021’s Six Words on the Pandemic book, she managed to encapsulate why I — and so many people who come to SixWordMemoirs.com — feel the joy of six. It’s a movement that, at its heart and soul, is about community.

I feel lucky to have turned a passion project into a profession. I feel even luckier that, with the help of this community, we've created a place that continues to light or reignite a passion for writing. Some have turned stories that began as just a half dozen words into full-length books. Others have used the six word form to spark conversations around dinner tables, in houses of faith, at hospice centers and veterans groups. And one of the ways I’ve managed to make Six Words my profession is by introducing the format as a tool to boost team morale and audience engagement at companies such as Levi’s, Dell, and Mini Cooper.

In The Best Advice in Six Words book, the actor Joel Garland offers, “Go to where you are invited.” The invitations I’ve received as the “six word guy” have energized my soul and changed my life. One such life-changing invitation was from The Thurber House in my then home of Columbus, Ohio. There I led a storytelling workshop with around twenty teens, including Sara Abou Rashed, a seventeen-year-old Syrian refugee who shared this Six-Word Memoir: “Escaped war; war never escaped me.” Sara and I stayed in touch and worked together to turn those six words into a longer story in the form of a one-woman show written by her and directed by me. That show, A Map of Myself: A 70-Minute, One-Woman Revolution on War, Immigration, Language, Home, History, DNA, and Everything in Between, ran for twenty-two performances in Columbus, Chicago, and Philadelphia before the pandemic ended its run. Here we are at Chicago’s Stage 773 theater.

Over these last seventeen years, I’ve seen the power and promise of Six-Word Memoirs in so many different spaces and places. For a few years, I even worked with a publishing partner on an initiative that guided K-12 teachers through the process of making their own Six-Word Memoir classroom books, one that parents could then buy. The books were incredible. Our timing was not. We launched during COVID and a pandemic that both never seemed to end and absolutely upended education.

Which brings me back to six-year old Stanley. My guess is Stanley’s grandma, Nancy, didn’t know about our DIY book biz. What she did know was that asking her family to think about a memory, message, or wish for their beloved little boy would yield a gift that he — and they — would treasure forever. And so she made her own Six-Word Memoirs book for Stanley, shared it with me, and now I am so delighted share its perfect final page you with.

And so the six word story continues. Where will Stanley go from here? I can’t wait to see. And I can’t wait to see what’s next for Six-Word Memoirs