Introduction by Hal Zina Bennett
About the Author
Introduction
I love discovering new writers. That’s the fun of browsing a favorite bookstore or going online to
stumble upon an author you’ve never heard of before. You open their book and the writing leaps
off the page. Maybe it’s the narrative tone of the writing. Maybe it’s the lyrical rhythms of the
author’s language. Maybe it’s the characters, the description, the dialogue, or how you’re moved
along from page to page. Whatever it is that catches your attention and your imagination about the
writing the sense of discovering an author you’ve never read before is always exciting. You’re
transported out of your everyday life into a world created by another human being, and the
experience can change your life forever. Such was the case when I heard Richard Schmidt read
an excerpt of his first short story in a creative writing class I was teaching.
The excerpt he read that day described a young boy and his father in a pickup truck. I don’t
remember all the details, or even where they were going, and it was, after all, only a portion of a
story, but I was immediately envious. This writer was either a natural storyteller or he’d been
writing a very long time and had refined his craft. I wondered what he was doing in my writing
class and what I could possibly teach him. He knew things I didn’t know about writing fiction.
At the end of the class I told Richard how much I liked his writing and asked how long he’d been
at it. He appeared to be in his late 50s, so I figured he’d been at it for about half his life. He
answered rather tentatively, as if he didn’t exactly understand my question. What I learned that
day was that while he was an avid reader, and had always dreamed of writing one day, this was
his first serious effort at writing a complete story. The story wasn’t finished yet but he knew where
he was going with it and felt that the five or six pages he read was a good start. What he’d
written, he told me, felt pretty good to him, and it captured the relationship between father and
son that he wanted those opening pages to convey. I don’t think I shared my thoughts with him at
the moment, that if I had his fiction-writing gift I wouldn’t be teaching but would be home writing.
Our class met twice a month and Richard continued to attend. His writing got better and better. I
discovered that he didn’t know much about formatting a manuscript, using quotation marks in
dialogue, and his punctuation was rough. But he caught onto these things quickly. Within the first
three or four months he was writing complete stories and delighting us with them. His emotional
range was amazingly broad, as the stories in this book prove, from gentle and even reverent
episodes, such as you’d find in The Decorating or in Singletree, the title story of this volume, to
the violent and near-profane, as in his story John Edward. He’s also a master of humor, shedding
light on life’s lighter moments, as in Curls or Rio Amarillo.
As I got to know Richard better, I learned that he had grown up tough and fast in Richmond,
California, in a neighborhood where a teenaged boy wasn’t exactly rewarded for artful qualities
or for exercising compassion and understanding for others. Yet, somehow he had found his way
to good writing and had a rich, private, inner world created through his reading everything from
Zane Grey westerns to Hemingway, Faulkner, Jack London, Steinbeck and even the Bible. I
imagine him writing his own stories in his dreams, awakening to wonder if he’d ever be able to get
his creations down on paper someday, or maybe even get them published. In his teens, he was
running with a gang and living at the edge of the law—and certainly at the outer edges of good
sense. Hard to imagine at that period of his life that he’d even make it to the age of 21, much less
write a book. But somewhere, hidden beyond his thuggish exterior, this gifted storyteller was
taking on a bigger life.
I love discovering new writers. That’s the fun of browsing a favorite bookstore or going online to
stumble upon an author you’ve never heard of before. You open their book and the writing leaps
off the page. Maybe it’s the narrative tone of the writing. Maybe it’s the lyrical rhythms of the
author’s language. Maybe it’s the characters, the description, the dialogue, or how you’re moved
along from page to page. Whatever it is that catches your attention and your imagination about the
writing the sense of discovering an author you’ve never read before is always exciting. You’re
transported out of your everyday life into a world created by another human being, and the
experience can change your life forever. Such was the case when I heard Richard Schmidt read
an excerpt of his first short story in a creative writing class I was teaching.
The excerpt he read that day described a young boy and his father in a pickup truck. I don’t
remember all the details, or even where they were going, and it was, after all, only a portion of a
story, but I was immediately envious. This writer was either a natural storyteller or he’d been
writing a very long time and had refined his craft. I wondered what he was doing in my writing
class and what I could possibly teach him. He knew things I didn’t know about writing fiction.
At the end of the class I told Richard how much I liked his writing and asked how long he’d been
at it. He appeared to be in his late 50s, so I figured he’d been at it for about half his life. He
answered rather tentatively, as if he didn’t exactly understand my question. What I learned that
day was that while he was an avid reader, and had always dreamed of writing one day, this was
his first serious effort at writing a complete story. The story wasn’t finished yet but he knew where
he was going with it and felt that the five or six pages he read was a good start. What he’d
written, he told me, felt pretty good to him, and it captured the relationship between father and
son that he wanted those opening pages to convey. I don’t think I shared my thoughts with him at
the moment, that if I had his fiction-writing gift I wouldn’t be teaching but would be home writing.
Our class met twice a month and Richard continued to attend. His writing got better and better. I
discovered that he didn’t know much about formatting a manuscript, using quotation marks in
dialogue, and his punctuation was rough. But he caught onto these things quickly. Within the first
three or four months he was writing complete stories and delighting us with them. His emotional
range was amazingly broad, as the stories in this book prove, from gentle and even reverent
episodes, such as you’d find in The Decorating or in Singletree, the title story of this volume, to
the violent and near-profane, as in his story John Edward. He’s also a master of humor, shedding
light on life’s lighter moments, as in Curls or Rio Amarillo.
As I got to know Richard better, I learned that he had grown up tough and fast in Richmond,
California, in a neighborhood where a teenaged boy wasn’t exactly rewarded for artful qualities
or for exercising compassion and understanding for others. Yet, somehow he had found his way
to good writing and had a rich, private, inner world created through his reading everything from
Zane Grey westerns to Hemingway, Faulkner, Jack London, Steinbeck and even the Bible. I
imagine him writing his own stories in his dreams, awakening to wonder if he’d ever be able to get
his creations down on paper someday, or maybe even get them published. In his teens, he was
running with a gang and living at the edge of the law—and certainly at the outer edges of good
sense. Hard to imagine at that period of his life that he’d even make it to the age of 21, much less
write a book. But somewhere, hidden beyond his thuggish exterior, this gifted storyteller was
taking on a bigger life.
