Jan Schmidt is an editor for the online literary magazine Cable Street. Her short story “Pandora” was a Solstice Fiction Prize finalist and published in 2023. Other fiction has appeared in CALYX A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Litro Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Her short story collection was a finalist for the Eludia Award, Hidden River Arts, 2019. Her unpublished novel “Sunlight Underground” was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021.

Curator Emerita of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

CONTACT

Janschmidt91869@gmail.com

Note from Jan

Following a bumpy ride along a checkered career path, I suddenly found myself retired in 2015–retired from my position as Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. From college days in the art world through crazed band years and even while Curator, I continued to love and to write fiction, so now I’m finding that more time to write allows me to put words and sentences together with a greater sense of joy and intent.

My short story collection, Collateral Regeneration, was a finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts. Collateral regeneration, the opposite of collateral damage, is healing that is incidental to the intended target, where non-participants are accidentally or unintentionally restored to sanity. In my stories I give voice to characters who’ve endured major crises that diverted the course of their lives. In their attempt to fight disillusionment and uncover meaning, they find they have come closer to revealing the questions underlying the answers the “normal” world dished out to them. And me. Reciprocally, these damaged characters with their individualistic and humorous interpretations of the world, lead me, as a writer, to examine the flaws in more conventional perceptions. Regardless of race, sex, or social class, these characters struggle to understand one another and, doing so uncover the joy in themselves. They are also, by implication, de-marginalizing themselves, un-victimizing themselves.

Besides the collection of short stories, I have three novels percolating.

• The Ninth Step, a crime novel about a vigilante assassin group from AA and an FBI agent who is sent to AA for her drinking, but stays to investigate the murders
• Sunlight Underground, a novel, about a mother’s reunion with her son thirty years after his adoption at birth. See first chapter online at http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/sunlight-underground-by-jan-schmidt/
• Something Strange Is Happening To Me is a mother/daughter relationship novel, set in in a small Wisconsin city on Lake Superior, and a murder, though the real mystery is how Cathy, withdrawn and isolated, discovers that connection to others is the path to freedom.

And I’m stitching together a number of short pieces for a full-length memoir, The Book of Miracles, which looks at seventy years of family, friendships, addiction, recovery, adoption, and how life’s seemingly random griefs and marvels intersect.

Over the years, I’ve participated in a number of writing workshops, most recently with Eric Darton. Darton’s first novel Free City was critically acclaimed. His cultural history, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center became a New York Times bestseller.