Dear young writer,

I was a writer when I was ten years old, because that's when I started writing in a diary (that's what we called "journals" when I was young) and that's when I started writing poems. The next year, when I was eleven years old, I was placed in an orphanage, and I used my writing as way to deal with loneliness and sadness. Writing was very important to me then, and it is important to me now.

A writer is not someone who is published, or someone who is famous. A writer is someone who writes. Now I am not young any more, but I still am a writer, and I have not forgotten being a writer when I was very young. It's important to write when you are young. All important things need practice. Writing is like dancing or painting or sports -- the more you do it, the deeper and better the work will be.

What is most important is that you, yourself, be the one who judges your work. Don't let anyone else judge it. If you know in your own heart that you are a writer, that's the truth of the matter. Someone else -- a teacher, a family member, a friend -- may give you suggestions, but you are the artist. You are the writer. You are the one to decide what your words say, and how they say it.

Read a lot of different writers, and think about how they do what they do. Try it out for yourself -- try doing what they do. It's good practice. But most of all, just tell the truth. Try to tell more and more of the truth -- of what you experience, and of what you imagine. What you see. What you dream. What you pretend. And what happens to you. I am so glad that I have now the words I wrote in the orphanage. I lived there until I was thirteen. Those words let me meet that little girl that I used to be.

Good luck with your writing!

These are a few of my poems that I want to share with you.

-- Best wishes,
Pat Schneider

LUCY, LARGE BEAR

Carved by Eskimo Woman into stone, 24X37, 1961

Great Bear,
fur cut into stone,
Great Bear,
alone,
Sure of herself, slow,
what does the Great Bear,
bright bear,
straight from the heart of
night bear
know?

Great Bear knows
what the Eskimo knows.
Great Bear goes
where the Eskimo goes.
The woman who cut her into stone,
the woman who cut her, she alone
know what the Great Bear,
night bear,
straight to the bright day
light bear
knows:

where she goes.

(Published in Alphabestiary:Animal Poems from A to Z,
Edited by Jane Yolen. St. Martin's Press 1995.)

RIVER

A delicate fuzz of fog
like mold, or moss,
all across the river
in this early light.
Another day, I might
have still been sleeping.

What a pity. How the stars
and seas and rivers
in their fragile lace of fog
go on without us
morning after morning,
year after year.
And we disappear.

(Published in Weather Report,
Edited by Jane Yolen. Boyd's Mill Press, 1993)

Pat Schneider - 413-253-6353
P.O. Box 1076 Amherst, MA 01004