Traveling Artist Seeks Audience

Steve McAlphabet
5 min readMay 14, 2023

I am a multi-faceted artist who will be riding my motorcycle from Florida to Canada and back from August through October this year, and I’m looking for people I can connect with and perform for along the way. My motorcycle is a 2002 Yamaha V-Star named Vivian who has taken me 30,000 miles through 31 states and Washington DC in the last two years. I have a few things to offer, and I hope you have some interest in at least one of them.

Strapped to my motorcycle is a bamboo acoustic guitar named Luna. I have written 40 original songs and do a number of renditions. I have a custom deck of playing cards that have all of the songs I can play, giving my audience the opportunity to choose what they’d like to hear. I’m like an acoustic wandering jukebox.

In my saddlebag is a 1959 Olympia typewriter, a sign that reads “pay what you want poetry”, and a bunch of 4x5 inch pieces of paper. People tell me what they want a poem to be about, and after asking any follow up questions, I can usually write a pretty good 18 line poem in about 10 minutes or so if I’m not disturbed. I’ve been paid with Washingtons and I’ve been paid with Benjamins, but the experience of reading my poems to people in the moment is invaluable.

In the other saddlebag will be a few copies of my recently published tenth book, A Group of Critters. It’s a coloring book based on a poem I wrote five years ago about the collective nouns we use to describe animals. I’m trying to get it into as many zoo gift stores as I can, and I also perform it as a song…

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Steve McAlphabet

Steve releases a new song every week. This summer, he is taking his 4th multi-state motorcycle trip to reach his goal of riding to all 48 contiguous states.