About
Menachem Elyah Paull
מנחם אליה פאל
Writer, independent researcher, CME-certified diabetes educator. Montréal, Québec. I publish under the name Mark E. Paull.
I write family histories, memoir and essays, and I do research into what medical data fails to record. Those look like different jobs. They are the same one: finding what was true and did not get written down.
The short version
I ran a travel agency in Montréal for thirty-four years — Marksted Agencies, which I joined in 1975 and owned from 1980. Thirty-four years of listening to people describe what they wanted and working out what they actually meant turns out to be excellent training for this.
I have lived with Type 1 diabetes since 1967. Sixty years, more than a hundred thousand insulin doses, and millions of small decisions nobody recorded. That is the origin of the research, and it is also why I understand exactly what it costs a family when a life goes undocumented.
My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Missouri Review, Minyan Magazine, Intima at Columbia University, Folklife in BC, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Attention Magazine, the Jewish Post & News, STAT News and Diabetes Care. I write the Aliyah at Seventy column for The Times of Israel. “The Last Injection” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; “When Lindy Saved My Life” finished in the top ten of the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.
My grandmother Mina Kornfeld ran kosher hotels in the Laurentians from the nineteen-thirties. My mother Rose was among the first women in Québec to own a travel agency. I did not choose this subject. It was in the house.
Selected work
What I have written.
Short story · Pushcart nominee
The Last Injection
Minyan Magazine, Issue 16. A Jewish family, an illness, and a pharmacist brother. The closest thing online to what a family history from me reads like.
Read →Essay · Editors’ Prize top ten
When Lindy Saved My Life
The Missouri Review, BLAST anthology, March 2026. Named among the top ten in the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.
Read →Family history · sample
The Stone Thrower
Two chapters on my grandmother Mina Kornfeld — Sadagora 1900 to Montréal 1955 — with the ledger of what is known, contested and lost.
Read →Memoir · manuscript
Come On, Marky
Fifty-nine years inside Type 1 diabetes, a Montréal Jewish family, a travel agency, a son. Full manuscript requested by a literary agent.
More →Essays · manuscript
How to Read a Spiral
Thirty-seven chapters built on a spiral rather than a line — the same subject returned to at greater depth each time round.
More →Research
ESP-360°
Peer-reviewed work on decision provenance and measurement artifact in continuous glucose data. Diabetes Care, Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics.
More →Credentials
Peer reviewer and published author
Diabetes Care, American Diabetes Association. Also published in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics and STAT News.
CME-certified diabetes educator
7.75 CME hours (2025), including 4.75 AMA PRA Category 1. Clinical practice 1979–1983; independent practice since 1983.
Academic collaborations
Leo Anthony Celi, MD (MIT / Harvard Medical School) and Jack Shahin, MD, FRCSC (University of Toronto).
Intellectual property
Two U.S. provisional patents filed October 2024, covering behavioural decision architectures in clinical AI and neurodivergent cognition.
Languages
English, French, Hebrew. Interviews in any of the three; finished writing in English.
Full academic record at ORCID · professional history at LinkedIn · the full 2025 CME record.
Elijah Shane Paull
The project carries my son’s name. Eliyahu is the one who is expected — a cup poured at every seder, a chair set at every brit, the door opened whether or not anyone is standing there. It is the oldest way we have of saying that someone is not finished being remembered.