I know this city inside and out. I’m a fluent five-borough man. I grew up in Manhattan. My first few apartments were in Brooklyn and the majority of my paramedic career was present in the Bronx. My New York is a place where the whole world shows up to try to carve out a piece of security amidst great chaos. There are huge contradictions and moving parts. Billionaires with limitless privilege live alongside highly vulnerable immigrant communities. Whole neighborhoods of dispossessed Americans with the life span and the lack of infrastructure of someone living in an undeveloped country. This is a place where unexpected things happen fast, and we try to adapt. 

I have worked for 20 years on ambulances in all 5 boroughs. I can feel the physical pulse of the City both from the lives we saved and the ones we lost. No matter what their circumstances, creed, or identity, these are my people. Whatever we have to do to make it better for all 9 million of us who live here, that’s what I want to be a part of. I have always felt that the destiny of our city is to produce people who live with consciousness and a feeling of empathy. We ride trains together. We work tirelessly to afford to live here. We have one foot here and one in the old country. We fall in love and our children have mixed roots. The city forges us into something unique. It radiates a glorious struggle of the world crashing upon our shore as we strive to win the fight of dreams vs. nightmares. 

I am a 20-year veteran of the Emergency Medical Services and a Native New Yorker.

I served in the FDNY EMS for 4 years and have also served overseas in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Haiti, Iraq and Syria as a medical provider or instructor of nascent EMS formations. I say served, not worked because I have never been paid for the work I did in other countries. I am a 911 Paramedic in the Bronx and also a Community Paramedic in East New York, Brooklyn. I am a J.D. Candidate at CUNY LAW. I am a writer, a poet, and a human rights advocate. I am hard man to make disappear.

I am a dynamic and experienced practitioner in the fields of emergency medicine, humanitarian relief, sustainable development and capacity building in developing nations. I am leader who leads from the front.

I have worked as a front line medical provider and manager during the 2010 Haitian earthquake catastrophe, in Iraq and Syria during the Enduring Freedom Operations and in the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn as a 911 Paramedic throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I am a highly dependable front line Emergency Medical Provider committed to extraordinary patient care as well as effective advocate for human rights.

I am an innovative professional able to succeed in remote and austere environments. I am a person who can organize effectively amid stress and chaos, able to seamlessly combine tactical boldness with cross cultural cooperation.

To whom it may concern,

Thank you for your time in the consideration of my work.

I, Walter Sebastian Adler, am a New York City native. Relatively early in my life made the mistakes of holding subversive political views, undertaking the practice of paramedicine and becoming serially involved with women from the former Soviet Union. Thus my adventures on ambulances, in idealistic efforts and using my pen as matter of record have managed to craft many manuscripts based upon the things I have seen. Largely influenced by New York Noire Futurism and Post Soviet Realism. Mostly influenced by those I have loved and struggled beside.

My life has been punctuated with other people’s violence. I spent my coming of age years in Israel at the height of the second Intifada. I was nearly murdered in a pogrom by a mob on a subway train. Rescued by a Bangladeshi Muslim, a Russian girlfriend and my own two fists. I served in the FDNY four years as an Emergency Medical Specialist. I spent five years smuggling medical supplies and training Haitian dissidents as paramedics. I studied international development with dissident radicals, technocrats and NGO workers from across the world. I have served the Kurdish movement in Iraq and Syria. I worked on the front lines of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I am trying to capture in words the explicit violence of a world my American people have no idea is real. I try in my manuscripts to craft a future America where the violence of past and present times is here and the mountain is less secure. Each manuscript is from a different period, but all of them use those I have known well to paint what I can never with enough stories capture: the blackness of misery in the world beyond our gates and the intrigues & aspirations of the refugees who arrive here.  

On this website is a wide sample of my work.

The Motherland Call “American Refugee” is a seven-part series about an American youth who ends up in concentration camps no one knows exist and then into an exile in the Jewish Military Colony. First in London and then in Israel, it is about the beginnings of an Israeli resistance movement at the very end of the Pax-Americana.

The World to Come “Partisan Songs + Fire on the Mountain” is a four Act Noire epic about the strange beginnings of new global consciousness after am Irish Haitian Chechnya fated revolt in the Borough of Brooklyn.

In The Company of Rescuers is about the struggles of various EMS personnel and Haitian natives following the deadly 2010 earthquake in Haiti resulting in the death of over 300,000 and also the rise of the nation’s first ambulance service.

The Great Unlimited Operation of 2012 is a collection of futurist epic love poems celebrating the Russian mentality unleashed in America.

In Ambuland is a collection of short stories from New York City ambulances.

Homage to Rojava is the story of foreign volunteers serving in Kurdistan during the war with ISIS.

I am looking to acquire a literary agent and a good editor so that I might share my work with a broader audience than sympathetic friends. I believe my voice is strong and my work has great merit, yet I am known as well for what I do as much as what in my writing I can record.

   

Thank you for your time, enthusiasm and attention.

        Walt Adler