…the Author
Husband, father, middle-manager, writer, podcaster … I’ve got it all! Each week I produce a brand new humor essay. You can read them on this site or listen to them in audio form at my podcast site:
http://www.shortcummingsaudio.com
…the Essays
In the early ninties, I was a stringer for a local paper. To fill space one day I wrote a funny piece about travelling with a two-year-old. The editor liked it and asked for more in that style. Short Cummings was born.
I joke that I wrote an allegedly humorous column, but that there was never enough evidence to convict.
After I’d been writing for about a year, the paper underwent an editorial change and my services were no longer required. I archived my old files and turned my hand to other kinds of writing.
From time to time my wife would pull out the old columns and tell me I should take up writing them again. To my mind, without an audience, there wasn’t much point. However, when I started looking for a format for a podcast, it all sort of came together.
After two years of podcasting, my listeners requested (politely, but insistently) that I make the text of the essays available. You’ll find all of the essays listed on this blog.
…the Title
Well, my name is Kevin Cummings and the essays are short. Get it? Hi-lar-i-ous, right?
There’s truth to that first statement, but there’s another reason as well. My dad is only 5′ 4″ tall and gets a might feisty if you call him short. During his military career (22 years U.S. Air Force) he routinely scratched the word Short Cummings out of memos and replaced it with “foibles” or “failings”.
When I needed a name for the column fifiteen years ago, I recalled that facet of dad’s personality and capitalized on it.
