A collection of six-word memoirs by bestselling and little-known writers, submitted to the online "SMITH Magazine."

Brendan James Murray has been a high school teacher for more than ten years. In that time he has seen hundreds of kids move through the same hallways and classrooms - boisterous, angry, shy, big-hearted, awkward - all of them on the journey to adulthood. In The School, he paints an astonishingly vivid portrait of a single school year, perfectly capturing the highs and lows of being a teenager, as well as the fire, passion and occasional heartbreak...

People who have read my books, particularly "the art of war" and its cousins, have a vague idea of the odyssey of a particular solitary guy, wracked by guilty and riven by self doubt, as he struggles toward his destiny as a writer. But they have only the scantiest conception of the particulars of that journey. These particulars, I'm hoping may be of use to others as they wrestle with their own version of that same odyssey. So let me try to strip it...

Since its release in 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of moden psychology with Joseph Campbells' revoutionary uderstanding of comparative mythology. In these pages, Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world's myhtic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world...