News about Pat's Writing

News about Pat's other work

Personal News

News about Pat's writing:

The Summer, 2006 issue of North Dakota Quarterly contains six new poems by Pat Schneider and reviews of two of her books, Another River: New and Selected Poems, and Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography.

May 4th, 2006 -


Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States,
chose a poem by Pat Schneider for the
weekly news column offered to newspapers by
American Life in Poetry.

Pat was informed by American Life in Poetry
that it has also been translated into French
and is being offered in a French newspaper.
"A worm in an apple, a maggot in a bone, a person in the world. What might seem an odd assortment of creatures is beautifully interrelated by the Massachusetts poet Pat Schneider. Her poem suggests that each living thing is richly awake to its own particular, limited world."

- Ted Kooser, writing for American Life in Poetry

See the original article and poem

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News About Pat's Other Work:

I am home now from a summer and fall of writing with a good number of you in Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Carolina, and in Berkeley and Sacramento, California. What a rich chorus of voices I have heard -- what a flock of new books, articles, published poems and song lyrics have gone out into the world, and with what courage we have gone into the unconscious where our spirit and our art has its spring.  

Before me is a long, cold New England winter.  It gets dark early here now, and it gets light late.  Good for going inward -- good for writing.  I am working on a new book, and looking forward to a winter of writing. The reviews of my books and publication of the new poems in the North Dakota Quarterly was a lovely encouragement.

In November, 2006, I had the opportunity to lead workshops for two weeks that moved me so deeply, I came away feeling I had been given a big bouquet of wildflowers.  We met in Sutter Writers LAMP (Literature, Arts & Medicine Program) at the Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, California.  Under the brilliant direction of Chip Spann, who founded the program, five workshops using the Amherst Writers & Artists method meet year-round in the Medical Center. Writing together, everyone in the workshops either lives with a life-threatening illness, is a care-taker, or a medical professional. All of the writers had been using our method for some time. We wrote, laughed, wept, teased, revealed, and in the process, created art from the stuff of our lives and our imaginations.  What an extraordinary work they are doing!

The first weekend in December, I led a two-day workshop here at our home in Amherst. I had wondered whether two days would be enough to bring folks from beyond our immediate area, but the four who came the farthest (Ohio, Canada, New Jersey and New York) enthusiastically encouraged me to continue to offer two-day retreats, so I have scheduled two for 2007, one in May and one in October, both on three day weekends. Click here for Pat's full calendar schedule.

It has been a full season of travel, public speaking and leading workshops. Now I center in to winter months with my 24 weekly workshop members, and to concentrated work on my new book, and I look forward to another time of travel when days are longer and warmer.

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Personal News (More than you wanted to know!)

September 24, 2007

Summer in Amherst is not quite gone – in the side yard the antique hydrangea is a tower of blooms, and the yellow cosmos are almost head-high behind their shorter companions, the zinnias. My hollyhocks, brave little broad-leaved soldiers, didn't make it all the way to blooming after the woodchuck made a salad of them in their adolescence. We caught the woodchuck in a Havaheart trap and transported it to the great wild world around the Quabbin Reservoir. The hollyhocks tried bravely to make it all the way to blooms, but already some trees are turning red and gold. In a few days October and autumn will be here in earnest.

November 6, 2007

And now even autumn is almost gone. The tree beyond my study window is ablaze, but almost all of the crimson and even the gold is now on the ground.

It was a good summer for Peter and me. In July we finished up some major work on our house, a hundred-year-old farmhouse that we love dearly. Peter has a "room of one's own" now – in fact, two rooms, one for his computer and one for his hammer. The computer certainly hogs most of the time – the hammer languishes. But that's all right. He is at work on both poems and theology, and I am in love with both parts of his work. He has come to his own writing only in his seventies, and it opens doors for the reader into the mind and heart of this man I have loved for so many years – doors that weren't really open before. He has received truly wonderful response to his book of poems, Line Fence. The theological work is very different, but intensely interesting. Peter has been my teacher and my guide, spiritually, for over fifty years; always his teaching has led me toward greater freedom.

After painting and wallpapering a bedroom upstairs -- a task in which I was only a minor partner, actually, after Bethany and Katie who came from Philadelphia to do the job with me -- the rest of the summer was spent in public work. I led two week-long workshops in California at Pacific School of Religion, a more than 300 year old liberal theological school, and my alma mater. I love that place inordinately; it is the hill on which I broke free from the poverty and the emotional illness in my family of origin, and became my own self. It is a beautiful place – old stone buildings in the Berkeley hills with a view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. I have been leading workshops there in the summers (and sometimes in Intersession, in January) for more than twenty years. Always there is a rich and diverse group that gathers in the archeological museum, the great room that was the school library when Peter and I were students there.

We were married in the chapel at PSR, and this year that was especially poignant, because we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary on August 17. Our four children gave us as an anniversary gift our first Elderhostel adventure – to study volcanoes and glaciers in the Pacific Northwest. Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Ranier and Mount Adams. Amazing scenery, an amazing week of celebration for us.

And then back to Amherst, where I led a two-day retreat here in our home, and the four-day annual Post-Certificate Retreat and Training for persons who have already completed the certificate training in the Amherst Writers & Artists workshop method.

Now life settles into the quietest months of the year: November through February, when New England hunkers down under blankets of snow and I hopefully will spend many hours here in my little attic writing room, working on my new book. It is an exploration of what it means to write as a spiritual practice. It feels like a huge, wild creature, that subject – the sort of wild creature that you love with all your heart, and fear with all your mind, and must search for in every possible cave, every cliff edge, every mountain top, every crevasse, every wind in every tree. And so it challenges me, and it may take me a long time to write, but I come to the effort with joy. And that is the sure sign that I am on the right track for my own soul work, regardless of whether it ever sees the light of day as a finished book.

And so, I leave this letter to you, and go to that work.

With love to all my writing companions, known to me and unknown –

Pat Schneider

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November, 2006: I walked this morning on the bike path with my clippers hidden in my coat pocket.  I went early enough to miss most other walkers and bikers, and went off into the huge Amherst college woods and cut some wild winterberries for my front porch. I actually love winter, it's just the transitions that are annoying.  We work hard to live with deciduous leaves and snow — but it's worth it.

Peter is happy as a pig in a mudpuddle (a slightly less rude image than the original from my Ozark beginnings) because the basement is now a construction site and the back yard is full of piles of dirt, broken concrete, leaves and discarded junk. Hopefully soon snow will make it interestingly invisible. He's making "a room of one's own" for himself at the back end of the basement, and a tool room out of our junk room.  I'm calling it his "hermitage."  Dan Wallach, the neighbor who's helping him calls it "Peter's suite."  Whatever.  It's a royal mess, but as long as he's happy, hey! What's an eighth of an inch of dust on every book, every piece of furniture, every stair step in the house?

He has painted his floor brown. He did not ask my opinion, and that was wise. It reminds me of -- well, something brown.  Never mind.  It's his floor. There are strips of aluminum stapled onto the floor around two sides where the walls are big rocks and concrete, to keep things from falling off his desk into the gutters that run all around the edges of the concrete floor. In the spring, rainwater will be pumped out of those gutters every five minutes or so.  I mean, we are talking basement here, not  a "room" in the ordinary sense.  He doesn't have a wall between his room and the rest of the basement yet, but there is now concrete on the floor of the tool room, and an outside door with a window, and I have to say I am really impressed.  I never thought I would live so long as to see this.  It's in the realm of miracle.  This is a man who loved the junk in that room so much that once when he made his only effort in forty-nine years to organize his tools, he ended up with a series of piles in the yard that lasted so long I went out and took pictures of them, got them developed, and handed him one of the most ghastly.  He stood gazing at it for a moment, and then murmured reverently, "Oh, isn't that beauuuuutiful!"

Well. Now he has the floor of a room of his own.  No wall yet, but a floor that covers the whole back third of the basement. At least he's not in the darkest, most spider-infested corner any more.  When he announced, in the days when we had eight work stations down there (doing AWA and AWA Institute outreach to low income folks) that he was moving back behind the water heater, I told him "over my dead body." I've tried for years to interest him in an upstairs room. He answered, "I'm moving!"

After about six repeats of this inspiring dialogue, plus my lectures on the dangers of mold, rot, and ruin, I told him, "O.K., move.  But you have to have some daylight back there! If you haven't knocked a hole in that back wall and put in a window by November 1, I promise that on November 2nd there will be a man with a sledgehammer outside knocking one in for you."  I have been known to occasionally live up to my threats, so on October 31 he knocked a big hole in the wall and needless to say, since it often snows by Thanksgiving here, he soon had a nice big window above his desk.  Now that the furnace quit and had to be replaced by a much smaller version. he agreed to truly change his space. He no longer has a water heater looming over his right shoulder or a sump pump near his right knee that sounds like a freight train. The new one sounds like a Harley Davidson with asthma, but he says there will be "a sound barrier" built around it.  When he has finished his tool room.

Lest I sound like a ruffled grouse of a wife, (not "ruffed" – that's another bird entirely) let me say that Peter has as much fun at my expense (or more) than I have at his.  And I'm not about to tell you his nickname for me. Just trust me. He deserves whatever he gets.

The truth is, I'm beginning to like the idea of that tool room.  I'm starting a list . . .

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