In the Press
Other people like 400 Words, too. Here’s what some of them have to say.
“400 Words
This is a magazine of nonfiction short-shorts that comes out but once a year. It’s not only the most aptly titled magazine we know of—all the short-shorts are about 400 words long—but it’s sincere and pocket-sized, too. They’ve published two issues so far, both of which contain a good percentage of pieces that are in some way endearing.”
—McSweeney’s Recommends, on McSweeney’s.net
“The only thing harder than writing a long essay, many authors will tell you, is writing short. “But give people harsh restraints,” says Katherine Sharpe, 27, “and sometimes it spurs creativity, rather than hampering it.” That’s the idea behind 400 Words, the new zine she edits that limits its pieces to just what you’d think. “I don’t remember the three times my mom tried to kill herself before I was five. I do remember visiting her in the hospital, and I remember the long drive when dad kidnapped me,” one piece in the “Autobiographies” issue begins. Another, in “Compulsions,” recites the real-estate listings a man visits week after week—with no intention of ever buying. Not every piece in 400 Words is a gem. Sharpe gets her submissions—hundreds of them, all for no pay—by posting prompts on her blog and the Web site Craigslist, drawing writers and nonwriters alike; collectively, their work is personal, fascinating and distilled to the very core. “I teach writing, and that’s exactly the kind of exercise I’d give to students—to say a lot in a small space,” says Leah Ryan, a Craigslist-recruited writer from Queens in New York. Can you really say anything meaningful in 400 words? You be the judge: it’s this item, doubled.”
—Nick Summers, Newsweek Magazine, December 18, 2006
“400 Words is a new, thematic, small-format magazine of ’short-short nonfiction,’ ideal for reading on the bus. The first issue, ‘Autobiographies,’ features people’s life stories conveyed in 400 words or less, many written by young adults, but others by a septuagenarian aerospace industry retiree, the 16-year-old daughter of cocaine addicts, and a fat middle-aged woman. The focus of the forthcoming second issue: compulsion. $6/copy; www.400words.com.”-Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine, May/June 2006
“This book is a collection of life stories written in four hundred words or less. If you think this might be a boring read then you underestimate Katherine Sharpe’s editorial choices. Carefully selected from over three hundred entries, these stories are well written, funny, touching, tragic, and sometimes truly poetic. You only have to read a few pages before you ask yourself: Why didn’t I think of this first? And then, what would I write about my own life? It is this thought that makes this such a jewel, the ability to make the specific universal and vice versa.”
-From Microcosm Publishing
“Four-Hundred Words is a CD-sized lit journal filled with 66 different 400-word autobiographies on the theme of…life. Though the editor, Katherine Sharpe, claims the first issue grew out of ‘that weird time right after college, the time of looking around and wondering how the world works and how people find, and understand, their place in it,’ the array of contributors ranges in age from a 72-year-old physicist to a 15-year-old Taiwanese woman who expresses herself in exclamations, ‘She’s so URGH!!’ The portable train companion/coffee table/bathroom book has lists, poems, abstract associations, psychiatrist-sounding admissions, impressionable scenes, monumental firsts, chronologies, memories of birth—I could go on. The myriad forms range from the lyric and artsy to the plainspoken and truthful, ‘I’m forgetting important things about adolescence.’ How the different contributors tell their autobiographies are as varied as their themes—unrequited loves and loves that endured, geekdom to feminism, cybermarriages to race, superstitions to social justice. Most of the essays acknowledge the transitory nature of life, ‘I’m happy, but I’m still looking for a point to all of this.’ By reading through the varied identities of individual lives, bylined with only a first name, there becomes an awareness of the collective image that shapes a culture, giving this journal a distinct vitality ‘existing at the seams of sociology and literature.’ The voyeuristic yet introspective Four-Hundred Words encourages the reader to consider their life, their community, to ‘[…] embrace it all, the sadness and the miracles, my strange and wondrous life.’ On the success of this issue they will be printing twice-a-year and are currently accepting essays for their next theme, ‘Compulsions.’”
-Rob Duffer at Newpages.com
“400 Words is an institute for the deployment & enjoyment of micro-narrative, a Journal of Tiny Affairs. It is primarily a print zine. All of the pieces in 400 Words are (surprise) 400 words or shorter; each piece resides on two small, facing pages. Each issue of 400 Words is devoted to a single theme or question.The short responses are delightful in themselves, but when put into conversation with each other they gain a truly awesome kinetic quality.”
Claire Carpenter’s essay about her compulsion to conserve resources, from Issue 2 of 400 Words, was reprinted in the online edition of Plenty Magazine in December, 2006.
See also: an interview with 400 Words’ editor at Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s great 52 Projects website.