What's Your Moment?

Now that I've got your attention . . .


Question: Can a single decision, happenstance, accident, call, conversation, or even email change the rest of your life?

Um, yes way.

And the very cool people at Smith Magazine, makers of the "Six-Word Memoirs", have embarked on a new project called “The Moment." It's a collection of stories, testimonials, etc. of how a single moment changed a life in a profound way, and YOU are invited to participate!

Your Moment might be a split-second decision, something you witnessed, a message sent or received, a literal or mental discovery. Moments can be serious or silly, as short as a tweet, as long as 700 words, told via a single image or illustration, series of photos, or a scanned letter or post-it note. A selection of some of these Moments will appear as a book in 2011. I know you have a Moment. And the folks at Smith know you have a Moment, and we all know that it's an important Moment, and are asking that you take part in this poignant project.

Submit your Moment here or via email, Facebook, or Twitter (#mymoment).

So. What’s a Moment? It can be almost anything, as long as it’s true, personal, and changed your life in some way.

• Text Moments, as little as 50 and as much as 700 words. Most of the text moments will be short essays, but they can also be Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, IMs, or text messages sent or received.
• A postcard or letter, sent or received—or some other form of communication that provided inspiration, or altered your life.
• A photograph, a single shot, or series.
• An illustration or comic, a single panel, or series.
• Something different altogether—we look forward to being surprised by your creativity!

Sample Moments

• Cheryl Della Pietra, now a copyeditor and mother, picked up the phone at 3am to find it was Hunter S. Thompson calling. She had one moment to accept his offer to be her assistant, provided she could leave the next morning. Read more about her Moment.
• Adriano Morae almost pulled a knife on his schizophrenic brother. Instead, as his six-panel illustration details, he put the knife down and decided it was time to leave Brazil and start over in the United States.
• Piper Kerman, a VP of a communications firm and bestselling memoirist, ended up in the middle of an international drug ring, for which she would later serve a year in prison, because she had one conversation, with one woman, one night.
• Karol Nielsen saw a New York Times photo essay on families going to war, sparking her own memory about her father being sent to Vietnam when she was six months old. Her “Moment” is a poem about her father in a series of tweets.

The Moment book will be out in Fall 2011 from Harper Perennial, the publisher that made the Six-Word Memoir Project [http://sixwordmemoirs.com] a bestselling franchise. Previous SMITH books have featured contributions from Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Silverman, Malcolm Gladwell, Mario Batali, Gay Talese, Aimee Mann, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jane Goodall, Tony Kushner, Chelsea Handler, and the late Frank McCourt and Harvey Pekar, among many others.

Everyone has a Moment. What’s yours?

P.S. To read my entry, which is, of course, about running, please click here. Don't forget to leave a comment and/or pass the story along.