About Me — Edward R. Stapleton III
I Contain Multitudes
The Ship of Me-seus
The year is 1996. An anxious, quiet boy walks through the hallway, reading as he walks, perpetually buried in story. He is prone to anxiety and even panic attacks in trying social situations, but that is only in this plane of existence. There are worlds in his head.
The year is 2006. A child is dying. He was riding his bike when a car struck him. A helicopter lands, and a paramedic steps out and rushes his way. The paramedic tries in vain to rescue him, suctioning, intubating, monitoring him, but it is of no use. We can’t fight death.
Now the year is 2016. A teacher is struggling to bring King Lear to life in a high school classroom. He puts on a crown and grey beard and shouts, “are you men of stone.” Their jaded, disenchanted faces suggest they are, in fact, men and women of stone.
2026. While on Spring break in Saint Martin, one of dozens of foreign lands where he has traveled, an author makes some final changes to his manuscript, a novel about a woman — Sylvia Quinn, Professor at Columbia University on the History of Science — becomes trapped in the lives of her ancestors. She lives the life of one person after another, condemned to experience a past she cannot change. After each death, she is sent back to a life in the generation before. Based on feedback from several readers, he completes his fourth draft, and begins the querying process.
The shy and quiet boy. The paramedic. The teacher. The traveler. The author. These are all the same person. These are all me. These are the jobs I’ve had and the people I’ve been.
Plutarch wrote about the “Ship of Theseus.” An old ship sits in a harbor. From time to time, a repair is made, and a board, a nail, or a line is replaced with a new one. After centuries of time, every part of the ship has been replaced. Is it the same ship?
Ten years go by. Then 20. I am in a new marriage, a new job, a new apartment, a new reality. Am I the same person? I will leave you with this question for a while.
Why am I here?
I arrived on Medium on the 14th of last April 2026. Since then a careful a look at what I’ve written here might leave some people bewildered.
I shared chapters from a memoir I wrote during the pandemic about America’s destiny in changing times.
I shared some horror stories, one about a subterranean creature and the other about a reality where everyone smiles and if you don’t they kill you.
I shared poems about divorce and relationships. (I don’t really consider myself a poet. I don’t sit around writing poetry. But I like to play around with language and sometimes a poem drops out by accident.)
I wrote heartwarming short stories about midnight inspiration and doomed relationships.
I wrote essays about poems by Frost and cummings.
I began a publication celebrating the art of describing things.
Then I began a noir crime parody that uses the word fuck a lot.
At a cursory glance, there may not be much that unites these stories. I have read a few articles since I arrived on Medium that advised me to build a brand through a consistent style and content, so readers know what to expect.
But to me, this set of publications feels consistent, because what unites them all is me.
My old blog, from around 2015, involved fiction writing strategies and prompts. I would create a fiction challenge for myself, such as “write a 26 sentence story using the letters of the NATO alphabet,” or “turn a nursery rhyme into a dystopian horror tale.” Then I would write the story. Then, finally, I would speak to the reader, and give them a writing challenge based off of mine. The purpose of this blog was to experiment, to develop a voice, to build craft, to understand craft, and push myself to create after a period of stagnation. I wasn’t sure if anyone was reading it, and it didn’t matter too much. I was a mad scientist building some Promethean language experiment in my basement, and maybe it was brilliant and maybe it was trash, but it was my child and I would cherish and love it nonetheless. I was writing and creating, and that was enough.
I had a similar attitude years before that, when I cofounded Hungry Shakespeare with my ex, a blog where we brought literary finger puppets to restaurants and places around New York City and wrote reviews from their perspective. I was the Shakespeare puppet, she was Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and we had a few friends (Nietzsche, Poe, and an angry gorilla) to help out. I also attempted to create a literary magazine (Hungry Lit) on the same website, which I did most of the writing for (we had a few submissions I brought in from a Craigslist ad). We made Hungry Shakespeare because my ex was studying coding and web development, and I wanted to be a writer and put writing into the world, and for that moment our needs were in alignment. It didn’t matter who was reading it. It doesn’t matter that the site is long since gone (although I keep the quill logo alive as my avatar). What matters is that I was writing something and sending it off into the world.
Now I am a bit older, sitting on disordered collections of a mostly private self, and I want my Promethean monsters to know the light. It had been a dream since high school to get a novel published — a novel that I was proud of. I didn’t want it self published (I had done that before). I wanted someone in the industry to look at it, say it was worthwhile, and send it out into the world. Over the last year and a half, I have written such a novel. It is not my first book, but (although it may still need some work after four drafts) it is the first book I’ve genuinely wanted the world to see. I want to see it in a library, or on a shelf in Barnes and Noble, and hold it, and maybe, just once, sit across from someone on the subway and see them reading it. To be a writer, to me, is to be a voice in the cosmic choir of history, adding a few notes and chords to the eternal song of human creativity and hope and dreams.
But, as I have spent these years in private building a craft and making my little monsters, the world became an increasingly public place, where everyone carries a movie and photography studio in their pocket, where we do 15 second dance routines for a shot at fame, where we seem to have personas instead of personalities, where you can only write subtlety with a neon sign. It is a performative world, where no one gets published without a brand and a following.
So, in all honesty, I came to Medium for that brand and that following. While I’m here, I want to keep experimenting. I want to play with language and see what little monsters I can create. I want to make total strangers laugh and cry, sometimes with silly stories that use the word fuck a lot, sometimes with an essay filled with half-baked philosophical wanderings, and sometimes with poems about heartbreak. I want writing that sees and feels seen, which I think can bring a lot more enrichment to a life than a collection of listicles about 15 ways to enrich your life (maybe I should write that next?). That, I hope, is my brand.
Back to the Ship
This is not the same ship. I hold memories of the people I was — the paramedic, the student, the peripatetic lost soul, the child. Sometimes, each of them surges up inside, takes the tiller for a moment, and comes out in a sentence or an idea. They are inside me. They are a part of me. But they are not me.
I think that is the way with life. Change is the only constant. Life has changed me. Trauma and travel and joy and pain have changed me. And I have an incredible partner who has changed me in all of the best ways. Every year we paint a new painting over the same canvas. Sometimes the new painting is not much different from the old, but it is still a new painting. Sometimes the new paint chips away, and we see what was under it. But, if we’re practicing, if we’re working on ourselves and reflecting on the process, if we keep learning and growing, we get a little better with our lines and our perspective. Every year we show ourselves with a little more clarity, and hope to be seen.
Final Thoughts
Humans are complex.
You are a stranger reading this. I know nothing about you, and you still know little about me. I think if you and I spent a decade together having the deepest conversations, telling our full stories, writing profound letters where we share our most vulnerable truths, listening to every word with care and reflection, we might then be able to understand a fraction of the person we each have inside. A life is too big to share. I can hand it all over to you, but you will only grasp pieces, like a blind man grasping an elephant’s tail.
But everything is in the process — the act of sharing. We are a voice encased in a mind encased in a body for only a short time on earth. But that voice, in its evanescent moment, cut off from the physical world, longs to be heard. It cries out, is heard as a faint echo in Plato’s cave, and fades away.
That cry is the most human thing we do. We dangle like Whitman’s spider, we cast out our web, and hope to catch on to something. I hope you can hear it. I hope it sounds good to you.
