It’s a New Day for MediumDay.com

My Impressions of a Couple of Presentations — Liza Donnelly & Crow’s Feet

On Saturday, 8/12/23, I attended the very first MediumDay event. It went from 6 am to 9 pm, my time which is in California. I was so jazzed that I woke up at 3:33 am, one of those special repeating numbers which signifies nothing and everything all at the same time.

The presentation was a little rough with the presenters in the beginning because nobody was accustomed to the format and knew which buttons to push to allow comments and questions to show, but as the morning progressed and Medium staff intervened quickly, helped everyone to get their sea legs, we all got better at it.

There were some 26,000 Medium members who had indicated an interest in the program. In looking at the participants, I could only tell that 2,000 or so of them at any given time were actually participating. But I wasn’t watching like a hawk all day, and, of course, we are all of us in different time zones across the globe.

Many of the discussions I attended had what, to me, were impressive numbers of participants. As the day wore on, people dropped in and out, and at the end, some of those members participating in the sessions were not very large. I suppose everybody was getting tired and it doesn’t mean those discussions were not good. I am looking forward to browsing through the replay section and picking up on some of the presentations. Yesterday, there were 136 presentations available for replay.

If you are interested in seeing some of the sessions, go to MediumDay.com. The screen you get says it’s all closed, over, finito. Press on anyway. Even if you registered for the event, press the Register button. Yes, I know it’s a little weird, but trust me, eventually, you will get there. You are redirected over to the platform that presented the whole thing, which is a place called Hopin. You fill in your email address and are directed to look at an email you receive from Hopin with a code that you can copy and paste into the next slot online. Skid on down to the last selection in the left-hand margin of your screen and press replay.

I attended about nine of the sessions. Many ran longer than the allotted 30 minutes and so I would miss the first couple of minutes of the next session. In being able to watch the Replays, that doesn’t matter. That’s what I intend to do today, watch a few more of the sessions.

I watched Tony Stubblebine, our CEO, give the welcoming address. He said MediumDay was the first of its kind in all of the online world of conferencing. He called it an Unconference where people could come and go to whichever event caught their eye. I enjoyed it so much and hope there will be another one next year.

I took notes the whole day of the event. The notes were scratchy and pieced together. I’ve gone back over them and am filling in the blanks as time permits. I want to go back to many of the sessions I attended to hear those things I missed, basically to fill in the blanks.

I saw so many Medium presenters, ones I knew from before and new people I’d never run across before. They spoke of editing, writing, publishing, and current events, and they told their stories. I ended up following so many of them, intrigued as I was by their writing and their stories.

Just a Sampling

At 7:10 am my time (Pacific), I watched Liza Donnelly in the presentation How to Find Your Voice as a Writer and an Artist.

I had a split screen where she talked and another where she drew. The screen print I took is Liza speaking, drawing, and me taking notes. Liza said she’s been publishing on Medium for ten years. During the presentation, Liza found it difficult to speak and draw, which is normal for an artist because you are using both sides of your brain at once.

Liza said finding your voice as a writer and as an artist centers upon connections. You connect and listen to other people, and you connect with yourself. Through time, you always stay in touch with yourself and check in to ask, “Why am I doing this?”

As a child, she was quiet and a loner and found it difficult to communicate. Her mother gave her a book of cartoons by James Thurber (one of my own favorites), and she began to trace the work. It was a way for her to connect with her mother.

She worked for The New Yorker. Used a fountain pen and watercolor in the session. She said you draw for yourself. You draw a lot. Submit 5 to 10 cartoons a week to The New Yorker. She draws in the style of James Thurber. 240 people attended at 7:15 am. She got lots of rejections. Do what you want to do now. If it doesn’t work, go to the next thing. The New Yorker process is hard, but it is helpful to find your own voice. She was consistent. After 911 happened, it was life-changing for so many people, herself included. She questioned at the time why she was doing work as a cartoonist and whether she should continue.

Liza drew this cartoon about two months after 911 happened. It helped her to check into her feelings. She did more political cartoons after 911, and if The New Yorker didn’t want them, she figured she would sell them somewhere else. We were paying more attention to women’s rights in those days. People began to be more involved with the internet after 911. Medium didn’t exist at that time but was soon to come.

At this point in the presentation, she started using a charcoal pencil with watercolor. She said then the color wouldn’t bleed. She began to write more and combine her pieces with cartoons. She said Medium and other places on the internet are wonderful because there are no gatekeepers. She said there are no senior editors. It’s about connection with you and your audience. 90%, or at least a high percentage of her work, didn’t get bought by The New Yorker. Some people won’t understand what you are trying to say in your cartoons or in your work. You are trying to find your voice. Many people ask where her ideas come from. She asks herself what she is thinking about. What is the world thinking about?

Liza showed us her mini-iPad. The program she uses to draw with that is called Paper. She showed us some of the pictures she made while sitting on the subway. I just loved it.

Hopefully, you can see the replay of the session here. My notes on Liza’s session are certainly not complete. Please have a look at her presentation. It was great. I am an aspiring and frightened artist and needed to see this session.

Later in the morning, I watched Crow’s Feet — Life as We Age, Finding Community in a Publication. Nancy Peckenham, Nancy Franklin, George “Ace” Acevedo, and Betsy Allen were the presenters. The replay for that session is here. When I took notice, I saw 72 people attending the session. That number might have gotten larger as the presentation went on.

Nancy Peckenham said she created Crow’s Feet four years ago. She felt that the way the media was presenting people who were aging was at odds with her own experience. She said there is a lot of creativity that happens after the age of 50. She said people are afraid of aging, and she wanted to let the world know that wasn’t the case.

Crow’s Feet has 23 podcasts available to listen to, where Medium writers and experts on aging are presented. There is also a FaceBook group. You can find more ways to connect on their website: CrowsFeet.com

The panelists spoke of how they prefer a personalized nature of the articles that are submitted to them. They asked that writers pay attention to grammar and spelling. They asked that sources be cited, and that the pieces not be too long. Two to seven-minute reads are encouraged. They don’t like fictionalized pieces. They asked for humor in the aging process and that younger folks contribute with their own thoughts and perceptions about aging. They asked for poetry and cartoons about aging. They asked for pieces about the human experience and things that we all share about the aging process.

George talked about generating ideas. He had a morning radio show when he was younger and was responsible for filling four hours a day, five days a week, with content. He no longer has the radio show, but the things he did during that time apply to the time he spends now as a writer.

George said that writing for Crow’s Feet, we have the advantage of speaking with our peers. With the radio show, he was speaking with a broader audience. He also said our own personal take on a particular subject is important. He said it might have been written about before, but our individualized stories are just as important and hold just as much interest.

George said every writer walks past 100 stories a day. A good writer is able to pick out five or six of them. He said it was a quote, though he wasn’t able to remember who said it. I looked it up, and Orson Scott Card is said to have said this, except he said it was 1,000 stories a day.

One of the things George does is write ten headlines or ideas a day. He said Johnny Carson and Jerry Seinfeld did this. Maybe out of the ten, only one idea worked, but that’s good. Maybe it takes 10 minutes, maybe it takes half an hour to write them, but it is all time well spent.

He said he carries a notebook around all day and takes notes. He said people tend to get irritated when they are at a party and somebody is writing something on their phone, but nobody seems to mind if you start writing a note in a notebook.

George said there should be a slight edge of being uncomfortable with what you are writing, where you aren’t sure if it’s going to be okay. He said that is good. Total fright is no good, but an edge of being uncomfortable is good to motivate a writer. George said for us not to be afraid to submit an article. He said we’d get better at it.

Nancy Peckenham said they had a writer at Crow’s Feet who wrote until he was 96 years old and filed his last piece a week or two before he passed.

I enjoyed this presentation. I had already heard of Crow’s Feet and was pleased to know more. If you can, listen to the replay and certainly check them out on Medium.

I attended at least seven more of the sessions, but these two were in the morning, and I just wanted to talk about them for a little bit.

I hope @TonyStubblebine gets us together next year so we can do MediumDay again, and I want to say thank you to him for doing this. I liked it a lot, and I feel I will get a lot of benefit from what I saw that day and what I’ll be seeing on the Replays.

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