This post marks the one-year anniversary for this website. Instead of writing a new story, I thought it would be interesting to reflect back on the last year of Saturday Morning Stories.
I’ve written 50 stories over the past year (I took one week off and this week would have been 52). I’ve enjoyed writing them, but there are certainly stories that stick out more than others in my mind.
So, here is a list of my top five stories from the last year (in alphabetical order) and why I enjoyed the story so much.
If you haven’t read any the stories on this list, I encourage you to do so as a starting point for catching up. And, if you have already read some or all of them, I encourage you to re-read them. I’m sure you’ll discover a new detail you missed the first time.
This story was the most deeply personal of any of the 50 stories I’ve shared to date. It was raw. It was emotional. And it’s important to have this discussion around mental health, depression, and the stigma that surrounds them.
This was one of the first story ideas I came up with before I even launched this website, and I knew the exact week I planned to share it — the 5th anniversary of my wife sharing her diagnosis publicly.
As a result, I spent four months writing it and re-writing it. It was a true labor of love.
This is one of the most unique stories among the first 50 because it’s about something that never happened.
That, in itself, allowed me to use my imagination and creativity to tell the story.
It also combined two of our family’s great passions: Art and baseball. Not always an easy thing to do.
It was also written at a time when international travel was still difficult due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Dreaming of a vacation was about all we could do at that time.
This one makes the list because it’s the first post my daughter was featured in and, perhaps directly correlated, it is also my artist daughter’s favorite story.
I also believe it’s the story that got her “hooked” on Saturday Morning Stories and saw her become more of a so-called character in them, which ultimately led to me sharing recently one of her school stories.
This one still makes me laugh, which is a significant achievement.
After I write these stories, I have read through them so many times that any humor has worn thin. There’s still some that I won’t read because I was “sick of them” by the time they were published.
So, for this one to still make me laugh is a testament to its enduring charm. Hopefully you feel the same.
This story, well, poem was intended to be both fun and a recap of the first half year of Saturday Morning Stories.
There were only 27 stories by that point. I was only able to reference 12 of them without making the poetry awkward but it still worked as a recap, I think. Did you catch them all?
Aside from The Depression Diagnosis, this story (poem) took the longest to write of the first 50. Despite the weeks it took, The Week Before Christmas remains among the most fun stories I have written.
So, now that you know the stories that were most memorable for me: Which were most memorable for you? Was there a story that hooked you and kept you coming back?
Leave a comment below or on any Married To An Artist social media.
Before even reading your choice I already knew which one was my favourite and like you your number one choice was also my favourite. It takes an amazing person to admit to depression and a devoted partner to help each one of you to get through depression periods❤️