Available for PreOrder: Selected Essays, Stories, and a Psychoanalytic Paper by Howard Schwartz

Epitaph|
Walt Whitman: On Writing from “Walt Whitman Speaks.”
The surprise to me is, how much is spontaneously suggested which a man could never have planned  for. I sit down to write one seemingly simple idea bringing into view a dozen other, so my work grows….

Preface:

In 2007 I wrote a book in three parts, cumbersomely titled: The Society of Secret Sleuths, Writer’s Workshop, How Can this Be? It Can’t Be Me. I had it spiral bound in different colors for each book and sent them to my children and grandchildren in the hope they would someday read them. The response was not overwhelming. My oldest daughter, forty-one at the time, said, “Dad, they don’t sound like kids. They sound like you. They were never published but have found their way into All Aboard, a chapter book of stories with a target audience of five-or six-year-old children, and one of them, as an introduction to Hide and Seek/Hidden and Found: Psychoanalytic Memoirs, Stories and Essays (IPBooks.net) 2017 and 2018 respectively. While waiting for the final edit to be submitted to IPBooks for Women: Biology, Culture and Literature to go digital in 2020 and with another manuscript Living With Poetry also copyrighted in 2020; and yet another novel, Strangers in the Morning, Lovers at Night in final editing, I recalled two books of essays, one by Zadie Smith: Feel Free and the other by Janet Malcolm Nobodies Looking at You, both brilliant, that encouraged me to try essays and stories after Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank; and stories by Anton Chekov who Tolstoy admired and thought a better writer than himself–not that I see myself as a giant like any of them, but only to acknowledge their influence on my writing this book, and also, the influence of Michel de Montaigne, who coined the word essay (to try on ideas) who retired to his studio and wrote Essays (1570), “So that people may better know me when I’m gone,” an aspiration I recognize in myself as I write by day and read at night.

Advance praise for Selected Essays, Stories, and a Psychoanalytic Paper by Howard Schwartz

This collection of narratives, poetry, and prose begins with the author’s disclaimer: his child characters might better resemble the grown ups they are destined to become. Unlike most adolescents, they seem to brazenly journey through their complicated worlds and are arguably the standout subjects of this collection of writing. They are served by the author’s sentimentalism as seen in “Alice’s Story” an d later, my personal favorite, the selection titled “Grandpa, Am I Your Favorite.” Dr. Schwartz’s adolescent characters benefit from their crisply real settings that are fraught with the angst, familial tensions, and uncertainty that is characteristic of young adulthood. Through them, he unfolds the ironical truth that only in adulthood are we able to navigate our fragile, former selves. Perhaps this is why his child characters appear more grown up than they ought to. The golden hue of childhood is captured in this collection, the same hue that can be gleaned from the look on a child’s face throughout their 4th birthday party. Child-like bubbliness emanates from“Rafting on the Old Muddy” where Kenny and Benny explore the waters along the Mississippi floodplain. Perhaps Kenny and Benny are a nod to the author’s grandson who moved to a far away state in Mark Twain territory. Through these characters and others, the writer exposes his devotion to both his family and the writing process – the latter serving as a sacred means to connect with his loved ones. A question appears at the end of the aforementioned selection, “How did Mark Twain come up with his ideas anyway?” The speaker answers, “Maybe he just pretended he was a kid who liked adventures and scary things.” In this collection, Dr. Schwartz does just that. He unpacks such adventures and scary things, emboldening the reader to examine the seemingly insignificant events of our childhoods that come to shape so much of who we are.
–Jennifer Koprucki is a teacher of English at Glen Ridge High School in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She is a graduate of New York University (BA) and Montclair State University (MAT, MEd). She is a Centennial Scholar at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in pursuit of a Master of the Arts. She resides in Montclair, New Jersey and is a committed public servant to the children of the state of New Jersey.