Four-Hundred Words – 2005

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!!”

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.” [Four-Hundred Words, 428 N. Cayuga St., #1s, Ithaca, NY 14850. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $6. www.400words.com] —Rob Duffer