Can you sum up your experience with the recession in about 10 words or less? Give it a try. It's a good mental exercise.

The public media collaboration EconomyStory is asking people to send in their economic memoirs via Twitter. Whether you're a Twitter person or not, it's a pretty good exercise in boiling down our recent experiences. Some submissions so far:

"Unemployed twice; hired myself; loving life."

"I work 800 miles from spouse."

"Contract job, no frills life, health care albatross."

"Box hair dye works just fine."

If you want to give it a shot, post your memoir on Twitter using the hash tag #EconomyStory and add it to the comments section here. I'd love to read them.

And while we're on the subject of public media collaborations, I thought you might like to know about NPR's Economic Training Project. A group of local public radio reporters from around the country recently visited NPR West and Marketplace here in LA for a training session on covering the economy. A lot of good stories should result from the project.

The project's supervising editor, NPR's Jason DeRose, explains how it works with comments from a few of the reporters: