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The Medium Platform, May Be a Good Place to Display Your Work – First Impressions from Karen Fayeth and Jamie Dedes

Medium.com logo / Public Domain

“Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.” Medium About

Karen Fayeth (Oh Fair New Mexico) and I have been playing on Medium for about six weeks or so, checking it out and – each for our own reasons – are reservedly pleased. This is a online publishing platform started in 2012 by Evan Williams, former chairman and CEO of Twitter. It offers the opportunity to share “stories.”  They don’t say “posts.” These stories can be poems, flash fiction, fiction, creative nonfiction, opinion pieces and so forth. Today, we share our first impressions of Medium. We do plan to continue our experiments with Medium, at least for awhile. Should you decide to come along for the ride, do follow us so that we can follow you. / J.D.

First Impressions: Karen Fayeth (Oh Fair New Mexico and Karen on Medium)

I have been blogging since 2007 so going over to Medium felt at first like giving up a lot of control. The more I use the site, the more I have come to appreciate the ease of creating, editing and posting stories. They are doing all the management and maintenance of the site and I can just write. That is pretty cool.

That said, Medium does work in many ways like a social media site. By that I mean you  have to have plenty of followers and claps to get your work seen, and I don’t have a particularly large network. In the early days, Jamie was kind enough to give me a boost via her network, which is robust, and I’m grateful for the reads and comments. I’m slowly building my own network via reading and commenting on stories. I’ve also befriended some wonderful writers on the platform.

There are some writers who make a lot of money on Medium, and it’s easy to get caught up in feeling like I have to be at that level. There are lots and lots of stories on the site about how to make money on Medium and I did find myself feeling anxious, as though I had to write as often as they did and I had to make as much money as they did, and if I didn’t I was a failure. I’m a lot more sanguine now as there is NO WAY I can hold down a full time job and write 2 or 3 posts a day.

Now about the money, in the three months so far, the most I have made in a single month is $7.46. One might say that is a pittance, but to me, I’m actually getting paid to write. It’s small but it’s something.

During the week of November 17th, I challenged myself to write a post every day and while it was a lot of fun it was also a lot of hard work. As expected some of the stories did better than others.

I did try using a service that drives clicks to a link for one of my stories to see if sheer volume of clicks would help. That post has 550 clicks but only 35 reads, so it has made a grand total of .08. The earnings model really does depend on Medium users clicking the link and reading the story.

So to sum it all up, I would say I’m still learning and I’m cautiously optimistic.

KAREN FAYETH: Raised most of my life in New Mexico, my job brought me to Northern California. I don’t usually identify myself as a Californian, simply a New Mexican living in California. In the first couple years after moving, I distanced myself from my home state thinking it backward and remote. Then I began to visit home more frequently and truly learned a love for my home state that only comes by gaining perspective. I’m a writer, a crafter, a photographer and labor at a “real job” during the days.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Jamie Dedes (The Poet by Day, The BeZine, and Jamie on Medium)

My focus is a bit different than Karen’s. I’m in search of platforms where I can have my say. I’m considering Spillwords and a few others as well. These for myself and on behalf of both off-and-online friends who post their poems on Facebook but are looking for somewhere more visually appealing to collect and showcase their work for access by others. These are folks who don’t want the burden or expense of a blog.

Medium might be ideal:

  1. It is in effect a minimalist blogging platform, easy and intuitive to use.
  2. Everything is maintained. No work on your part.
  3. No advertising. No clutter.

Other pros depending on what you are looking for:

  1. Ability to social network, if inclined.
  2. Potential to earn back your monthly $5 USD investment. I’d say posting poetry is not going to net much. Payments are based on time it takes to read. Poems will net you a few cents each. So far for November, I’ve earned $2.69. That’s with a couple of short stories thrown in.
  3. You get a “friends link” to go with each “story.” You can use your friends link in texts and emails and on Facebook, Twitter, or other micro-blogging and social media networks.

Possible Cons:

  1. Medium uses Strip for payments, which may work in counties where you haven’t been able to take advantage of opportunities that make payments via PayPal. You’ll have to do your homework on that. Neither PayPal nor Strip is available everywhere around the world.
  2. If as I am you are already heavily networking elsewhere, Medium might be just a bit too much of an addition.

You are able to register and feature your poems on Medium without a paying membership. They won’t be shared among Medium community members. Unlike Twitter, however, readers don’t have to be registered to read and folks outside the Medium Community can view your work whether or not you are a paying member.

RELATED:

Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

About / Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook / Medium

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications:  Jamie Dedes, Versifier of Truth, Womawords Literary Press, November 19, How 100,000 Poets Are Fostering Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

 

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The Sun Has Left His Blackness, the eighth poem in Linda Chown’s Ten-Part William Blake Series

The title  page of America a Prophecy, copy A (printed 1795), collection the Morgan Library
/ Public Domain

He was the loom’s loom,
spinning the fiber of revelation;
offering songs of social injustice,
the sexual potency of nature,
and the blessedness of the lamb.
Patti Smith

Like in a rocking chair on the edge of time,
this painting an overture to freedom, a ladle of love,
a luminous nest of linking ladders. Each level going up united.
It’s for to cherish this visual calmness as Blake’s visionary glory.
While his poetic prophecy may seethe with crackling doubt and dissent,
revolutionary odes, contentious acts of history and deceit,
This, the first painting with his name spelled out.
Blake fondly calls these sweet colors “illuminated paintings”
where he lays out his revolutionary love in peopled play.

It’s as though we’re inside an urban subway station
looking up. With Blake, it’s always some kind of looking.
People and how they do what matter in Blake’s sight.
Here, people spread about touching everywhere
in the kind of gentle that cooperation brings.
Fallen warriors in medieval garb, nude woman pointing to this poem.
Women reading, consoling, kinding.
This poetic prophecy one of Blake’s cosmic mythologies:
Orc’s refulgent passion grazes Urizen’s linearity.
Blake charts a new course for mental liberation.
The newspaper-like headline compels because it hearkens
a linking, a jumping up above and caring down below.
The prophetic poem contains fierce strife among nations and type.
But this sweeping image unfolds sweet closeness.
A new, all American revolutionary delight.

As Blake writes: “the fair Moon rejoices
in the clear & cloudless night.” And what a new light!
How lovely the people together democratic,
concentrating in peace, as though Thomas Paine bathed them
in common sense, and faith, hope, and charity.
Aware of the novelty of cultural freedom, Blake affirms,
“Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
Like Walt Whitman, for Blake, the sacred “loom’s loom,” the center sphere,
this image affirms a new vision of democracy, of human affairs:
a belief that “For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.”

© 2019, Linda Chown

The other poems in Linda’s ongoing Blake-poem series:

  1. Refections into William Blake’s “Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost,” Linda Chown
  2. Cohering Clashes: Wiliam Blake’s “The Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed in the Sun,” Linda Chown
  3. This New Ending of the Beginning: William Blake’s “The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve,” Linda Chown
  4. Looking Up High: “The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies, and The Suicides,”Linda Chown
  5. Double Trouble: Lamech and His Two Wives, Linda Chown
  6. The Sun in His Wrath, Linda Chown
  7. Touching Without Holding, Linda Chown

I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite (Routledge Library Editions: Modern Fiction) is now available through Amazon in hardcover and Kindle. Linda tells me a budget-wise paperback edition will be available in six-to-eight months.

This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark(1973) and Martín Gaite’s Retahílas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Martín Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large. / J.D.

Linda’s Amazon Page is HERE.

Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

About / Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook / Medium

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications: Jamie Dedes, Versifier of Truth, Womawords Literary Press, November 19, How 100,000 Poets Are Fostering Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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Literature Locked Up: First Amendment and the fight for access to books and magazines in our prisons

Photo courtesy of Johannes Jansson/norden.org under CC BY 2.5 dk

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”  James Baldwin

Last month a federal court ruled that the Arizona Department of Corrections was overly broad in restricting certain publications to people in state prisons, and ordered the department to establish clearer rules that are consistent with the First Amendment. The decision stems from a 2015 lawsuit brought by the magazine Prison Legal News, which alleged that state corrections officials were unfairly withholding the magazine from incarcerated subscribers.

“The ruling out of Arizona is a significant step forward for the First Amendment and for our fight for access to literature in sites of incarceration,” said Nora Benavidez, director of U.S. Free Expression Programs. “The court was right to recognize that Arizona’s policies towards book access give too much discretion to individual employees, who are then empowered to implement these policies in arbitrary or overly restrictive ways, and to demand narrow definitions for what content is prohibited.”

“PEN America has previously called for more explicit policies that more narrowly define the bounds for rejecting books, and we hope that Arizona’s revised policies will meet this mark,” Benavidez continued. “We need regulations that better enshrine the First Amendment within prison walls, and that recognize the importance of access to literature for our incarcerated population. We believe that this ruling can serve as an example for other jurisdictions to recognize the fundamental right to read where it remains threatened in American prisons.”

In September 2019, PEN America released Literature Locked Up: How Prison Book Restriction Policies Constitute the Nation’s Largest Book Ban. a research report on the state of the right to read in American prisons. The report concluded that “book restrictions in American prisons are often arbitrary, overbroad, opaque, subject to little meaningful review, and overly dismissive of incarcerated people’s right to access literature behind bars.”

Among the recommendations, PEN America concluded that state and federal officials should develop more explicit policies governing book restrictions; implement periodic review of their restriction policies; and ensure that prison officials strongly consider the literary, educational, and rehabilitative merit of any publication before determining its admissibility.

This post is courtesy of PEN America.

***

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

About / Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook / Medium

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications: How 100,000 Poets Are Fostering Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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Facebook, like so much in life, a mixed blessing …

“But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It’s like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, ‘only the paranoid survive.”  David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

I just posted this on my personal Facebook account:

I seem to be under attack. FB says posts are against community standards. Account also apparently hacked x 2. Peace? Sustainability? Social Justice? The video I responded to in the spirit of the video was allowed to go up but my comment is blocked. ??? So false political advertising that will impact the lives of many is okay with Facebook and so are abuses of confidentiality but sharing good news is not. So the wealthy get to practice freedom of speech but the poor do not. They even have prevented me from sharing some of my Calls for Submissions posts, which are only meant to help my fellow writers and poets get their own work out there, which as we all know can be a huge challenge. I don’t make income off of this. I’m just an old lady pounding a keyboard from my sick-bed, trying to do my best in the final stages of catastrophic lung diseases and a rare incurable blood cancer to remain productive and engaged and helpful. I am against no one, against no race, country, religion or lack there of. I’m not even against FB and its honchos, though policy is indeed sometimes questionable. Facebook does allow us to connect globally, which is a good thing. The Dalai Lama once said that people should have more festivals, the idea being that when we break bread together or share a bowl of rice, we see one another as human not other. In a way, Facebook is the equivalent of a friendly global festival . . . at least it is if that’s the way you use it – and all of YOU do. 🙂 That’s something for which I am grateful. Thank you, Facebook and Mark Z. I am for people, peace, sustainability, and social justice. I am only against the systems that ravage the lives of often helpless people/s. That would be the American ideal – however much we often fail at living up to it – and one would think Mark Z would share that ideal. How is that a threat? How am I a threat? Well dear friends, fellow poets, writers, artists, philosophers and spiritual writers, sharing my fave philosophy below. May this day treat you well. Amen. xo

Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

About / Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook / Medium

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications Poets Advocate for Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, How 100,000 Poets Are Fostering Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton