WHAT IS MY PLATFORM?an essay

Last Saturday (Oct.17, 2009) I attended the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association (CAPA) and listened to Adele Annesi explain the meaning of “Platform” and ask what our personal platform is. A platform is a short summary of what you stand for. The life position you want to be found in your writing. A short tag line that explains you and your substance (I know I am not quoting her correctly, but that was the gist of it). I started to think about my own life and what I stand for. It is easy to say I stand for Jesus since I am an Episcopal priest, although I am a bit of a maverick. But within this framework, I am many other realities. My life seems to take a shotgun approach to the world. I am a writer and I love to communicate. I also love to adventure and see new places. I am a sailor, and even though I can no longer sail and cruise the seas, this is also part of who I am. I make scale models of old sailing ships and workboats. I used to be an artist and would like to paint again, but all these other things get in my way. I am a romantic and would like everyone to know about the trials and songs of the old sailorman under sail. This is why I love to sing and play these old songs with my wife. Over all of this, and perhaps the most important, I am a family man, and love my family and would like everyone to have the support and love I feel from my wife and daughters. They have a lot of patience with my activities even though I have dragged them all over Central America. So what is my platform, my tag line? I want the “real thing” like Coca Cola but I am not sure what that is. I seem to want to share who I am, which is why I wrote Between the Devil and the Deep... I also am writing a book fictionalizing two years of my life in a ghetto. Down Island, another of my books is about sailing in the Caribbean. You can read it on my blog site (http://swartsfager-books.blogspot.com). Tenderfoot Dude, a pre-teen book about my adventures as a cowboy is written, but not published. Could it be, as Popeye says, “I yam who I yam?” I do not know as yet. But I am working on focusing and discovering what it really is. What an adventure!