Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a six word story. He responded with, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn”, and the six-word story was born. My City My Six (MCM6) is a participatory public art project that will reveal Toronto and its residents in celebration of Canada 150, six words at a time. From January through May 2017, the My City My Six project will ask Torontonians of all ages and backgrounds to share something essential about themselves in six words. Based on the six-word story concept popularized by Smith Magazine, this project invites Torontonians to write and contribute six words that best tells their story. My City My Six will culminate in a city-wide exhibition in the public realm in the fall of 2017, showing the diverse lives that collectively make up this great city at this moment in time. This project is led by Toronto Arts and Culture in collaboration with the city’s six local arts service organizations (Arts Etobicoke, East End Arts, Lakeshore Arts, North York Arts, Scarborough Arts and UrbanArts).
Stories will be collected through emails, workshops and events. A jury, including Toronto Poet Laureate Anne Michaels, will select stories to appear in the exhibition, which will include transit shelters, transit interiors, billboards and other public spaces. Local galleries, businesses and public spaces will also be animated as part of the exhibition in September and October 2017. Send in your story by email to culturalhotspot@toronto.ca and include your first name, the name of your neighbourhood and your age. Anonymous submissions are fine too! Join Scarborough Arts at My City My Six launch and at My City My Six writing workshops across Scarborough: MY CITY MY SIX LAUNCH Cedar Ridge Creative Centre 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM IC318, University of Toronto Scarborough 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM WRITING + BOOKMAKING WORKSHOP Thomson Memorial Park, 1007 Brimley Road 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Bluffs Gallery at 1859 Kingston Road See sample six word stories below (Courtesy of Six Words Minneapolis):
I was afraid, now I’m fierce All My Life, I’ve held on -Alf, 17, North Mpls. Go to the Park and Play At Ninety-Nine, I’m still a Musician -Gabrielle, 99, SW Seniors Ctr. If you have questions on My City My Six project, please contact Andrea Raymond-Wong, Community Cultural Coordinator at Andrea.Raymond-Wong@toronto.ca or 416-338-2469.We have a newly mandated soft word count. Minimum amount of words can be 200, the maximum can be 2,000. Please thoroughly proof and edit your work prior to submitting to us. All essays and fiction must follow MLA formatting. Preferred font: Times New Roman, 12pt., double-spaced. Please consider using 150% zoom in the Microsoft Office View feature. We are currently closed to poetry until further notice. Please note: we retain first electronic rights and non-exclusive rights. We ask that you credit “originally published on Chicago Literati” as an epitaph above your short story or essay if it’s published in a different magazine.
We do accept simultaneous submissions and reprints, but please inform us.We accept unsolicited submissions but only through our Submittable account. All submissions must include a brief, succinctly written third-person biography at the foot of said submission or included in the cover letter. Submissions should not be sent to our Gmail account. Submissions for THE DAILY FLASH are always open. THE DAILY FLASH doubles as a tax deductible gift and specialty flash fiction and flash column series. Submissions must be a minimum of 200 words and must not exceed 800 words. We do not take micro-fiction (e.g., “for sale: baby shoes, never worn”). Please follow MLA formatting and proofread your work prior to submitting. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” We’re seeking submissions for our dystopia issue from February 2nd until March 2nd. Please follow our mandated guidelines. Submissions that do not adhere to our formatting guidelines will automatically be rejected.
Please include a brief, third-person biography of yourself either in your cover letter or at the foot of your submission. We look forward to hearing from you!There are four new shirts in the xkcd store, along with posters and lots of other stuff! RSS Feed - Atom Feed Junior Scientist Power Hour This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). It was 1972 and Ted Stevens was coming to the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus to campaign for US Senator. At that time there was some act before Congress involving HUD that had much to do with Alaska. I was a reporter for the Polar Star, the UAF student newspaper, that semester, and my editor told me to go make Ted explain it to me. So I get to the upper campus commons, where students are coming and going for supper, and Ted parks himself at a table and a group quickly forms to talk to him.
I introduce myself and take a seat next to him. In a lull I ask him about the HUD program. I barely know what the initials stand for and it shows, but patiently and in words of one syllable he explains the whole act to me and the effect it will have on Alaska. All the while students walk into the commons, spot him and come over to introduce themselves and talk about what is bothering them (that year it was the draft, big time). Later his opponent, Gene Guess, shows up and starts table-hopping and shaking hands. I go over to get a quote and then return to Ted’s table, where he picks up the thread of his HUD explanation without missing a beat. I wrote up the story and turned it in. My editor, a Walter Burns-in-training who had no ability whatsoever to pay a compliment, read it and said in a surprised voice, “Man, I think I actually understand this.” Ted was never warm and fuzzy but he was always interested. That evening he looked me and every other student straight in the eye and he paid attention to what we said.
And he’d remember it, and us. I didn’t see him again for another eight years, this time in Prudhoe Bay. I said, “You probably don’t remember me, Senator, I’m–” And he said “Sure, I do, you’re Dana, I met you in Fairbanks in 1972.” I remember thinking, wow, I didn’t know I was that memorable.Ted was that good. Ted Stevens did more for Alaska and Alaskans than anybody since William H. Seward. There isn’t a person or a community whose lives he didn’t improve in a real, material way. We drive on roads he got funded, there are hospitals and schools and libraries that wouldn’t exist without him, he even found funding for my Authors to the Bush program for Alaska Sisters in Crime, and, yes, we fly more safely than we ever did before because of Ted. Alaska is what it is today largely because of his efforts in D.C., and there never was and never will be a better constituent representative. We didn’t always agree. I’ve still got a copy of the letter I sent him when we were getting ready to go into Iraq the second time, and I vividly remember the page and a half he sent in reply.