All My Children

I am honored and literally tickled to death that I am nine tenths of the way to having a K in my number of followers. What a noble and selfless pursuit, indeed! Some folks have several thousand, but here’s the thing, my 900 or so already has, like, the best people. And a few bots with impeccable taste, too. So here is everything I have published since first logging onto Medium back on the 6 of July, 2017.

The Russian bot story is one of my favorites, the idea as borne out of, well, the Russian bot scandal, but more specifically a few trolls who engaged me on my NRA essay, acting and sounding almost like Russia-sponsored anarchy-fanning automatons.

I’m really into translating verse this year. This is a personal favorite, because my daughter loves the song — you’ll find a few more below.

I am experimenting with verse translation, here is a triplet of children’s poems made popular by the same legendary singer Halász Judit:

An unexpected loss for the new year:

let me include this response to Tre’s 7-word writers’ challenge (the rest are all original posts):

Thanks Stephen for accepting these next two into The Junction:

A spur-of-the-moment sequel to my earlier Metro North “mini play”:

Getting a head start on the 2017 Christmas season …

A poem inspired by my adopted home of the Hudson Valley, which found a legit home in Mike Essig’s Other Voices.

My most popular article to date, proving that film still captures our collective imagination and endures as the common thread :

This was the piece where I first explored the idea of articles, poems, etc. as children you must part with:

Two more rants, one on the lighter side, and one inspired by shameful recent events:

Venturing into some more heady topics, with my new buddy Jack … (btw: both photos below were taken at the same apple orchard in upstate New York, on one gorgeous Saturday in October)

A bit more Resistance Poetry:

Political satire, bringing attention to the unrest in Catalonia — thanks Linh at Extra Newsfeed!

Some musings on social media interactions:

This next piece was close to my heart & a joy to write. Imagine my excitement when it was selected by the Medium editorial team for an audio recording …

Response to a poetry prompt by Katerina Canyon, and a tribute to the lovely island nation I called home for several years:

Having a bit of fun with high-end brand marketing:

Full disclosure 😉:

A companion piece to my first playful rant in the The Writing Cooperative.

Un unexpected loss:

A post inspired by the start of Fall and a birthday of a friend:

A poem inspired by an interaction with fellow Medium poet Zev:

Sept. 23 — published in The Writing Cooperative … does this mean I am a real writer now? 😎

Thank you, Ryan at The Bigger Picture! This publisher graciously accepted my stories early on, and offered some excellent feedback. They are my go-to for social commentary and tongue-in-cheek rants.

Just having fun with this one — at the intersection of travel, food and humor.

To mark my son’s 9th birthday, here is a bedtime story I wrote for him five years ago, now in its new digital home on Medium.

The artwork is based on my sketches, but I had help from a real artist, Denise Fulton.

My first tongue-in-cheek rant.

Musings on the sordid history and current state of sentence spacing. Seriously. This generated a lot of great feedback, and was my first submission picked up by Jake at the Creative Cafe.

This is as “creative” as my writing gets — but still, firmly based on actual events. R.I.P., tiny magnet.

My first Medium Series! Inspired by every trip I’ve taken to Taiwan from 2000 through the present.

My reaction to the sudden Medium re-branding back on Aug. 22, 2017.

This next story just sort of happened — the situation presented itself, and the inspiration for the narrative came to me in a flash.

I was at a children’s exhibit in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with my twins, just days after the Charlottesville riots, when this image inspired a stream of thoughts which I boiled down to a pair of haikus. Meg’s Resistance Poetry was the obvious home for it.

“Own It!”, my reaction piece to the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, which started on my birthday on August 11, 2017.

“Let Cooler Heads Roll…”, this grew out of a facebook crowd-sourced thought experiment, inspiration courtesy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

My first poetry submission on Medium. For the record, neither the idea nor the photo ‘came first’, they both evolved together into the final product.

This one started as a post to the closed discussion group of Mount Pleasant residents. I recounted the event on the same evening that it happened. The reaction from my community was

Travel, culture, language and humor have been the mainstays of my writing, and these shorts combine all these elements. Special thanks to Page Barnes for accepting them into The Haven.

Ideas for “A Ragtag Affair” had been kicking around in my mind ever since the 2016 election. I took the cover photo at a repair shop / junk yard not far from our house in Thornwood, New York.

My first Medium article. I posted it on a Thursday evening (July 6, 2017) and woke Friday to an email by a British politics & lifestyle blog that they wished to publish it under their banner. What a surprise — at the time, I didn’t even know what Medium publications were! Nor did I know the amazing journey I was about to embark on.

Thanks for everything, Your Friends @ Medium … and for all that’s to come.

Speaking of amazing journeys … as I wrote these last lines, I was reminded of The Who’s psychedelic rock opera Tommy. So many great songs, but this one in particular seems like a fitting tribute to Medium and the mind-blowing ride I continue to enjoy on here.