A Balanced Life
                                                                                                                             Synopsis
             Growing up in a Polish-American household fraught with anxiety and aspirations, I seized upon skating’s promise of gracefulness as a means to transcend my own awkwardness and confusion. I remember the dreary Saturday afternoon when I was eleven years old, and my uncle Leo brought me a pair of skates my cousin Carolyn had outgrown — I felt like Cinderella must have when she slipped her foot into the glass slipper.  The first time I used them my best friend, Sharon Ryan, broke her arm, but I was undeterred: when I skated I thought I was pretty.  And if I was pretty I would be loved.
            The story continues into my teens and college years, when sometimes I skated in the rink of Yale University hoping to attract a Yalie, while seriously neglecting my studies.  Nor did I realize I was on the brink of emotional collapse.
                  The third chapter recounts the early years of my marriage, when I laced up the boots of my second-hand skates three or four times a winter, at a time when  other women were pulling up their own boots and marching out their doors to the beat of women liberation anthems.
            The essence of skating is mastery of edges (each blade has two). But, in another sense, we were all trying to gain the edge over the competition. When I gave myself the gift of skating lessons as a fortieth birthday present, I was trying to juggle marriage, children and a career.  In short, I was trying to maintain my balance while holding my edge, an almost impossible situation, and the focus of the fourth chapter.
            The term “figure skating” comes from the patterns skaters trace on the ice, and, in as much as, skating has predictable patterns, it represents a sort of grammatical athleticism.  About the time my uncle gave me my first skates, I knew I had a propensity for words and found in grammar a satisfying anodyne for my chaotic family life.  In my late thirties I began writing free-lance articles, an experience that released my inner eagle in a way that skating never could.  The fifth chapter deals with my interest in writing and growth as a freelancer.
            The sixth focuses on falling, as well as the price we pay for self-invention and overreaching our limits. The seventh deals  with Olympians — twice I’ve had the privilege of being on the ice with Gold Medalists, and seeing them, and knowing their medals make them unique among us, the question arises: Was the price they paid for gold, worth it?
            Skating’s grace derives from an absence: the absence of metal that has been ground out of the blade, creating two edges, with a hollow — an absence — between them. But what happens when absence, a negative, becomes the most real thing  in your life?  What happens when nothing in life touches you like the void in your heart when someone dies?  These are the questions I explore in Chapter Eight, when my husband dies, and I doubt I can ever get up again, let alone skate       
            The final chapter deals with my returning to skating and my search for him among the stars on snowy nights. And my realization that ice is the midwife of life.   

The  fictional street St. Bart’s Way was founded after the First World War, when streetcar lines were extended to Baltimore’s leafy outer reaches.  From its founding, the denizens of the neighborhood surrounding St. Bart's Way wanted their homes to stand for permanence and, by extention, lives lived to right purpose.  But as the "The Haint," the first story in this collection shows, the houses were built on illegally and unethically obtained land, and the stories rising from that one perfidious act carry a sense of the destabilizing force impacting the characters' middle-class lives.  In one way or another, they all come to question the commitments they have made, the prices they have paid, and the lies they have told to others and to themselves in order to maintain the outward standards expected of  residents of St. Bart's Way.
 
I didn’t begin to write fiction until my mid-fifties and had no guage as to whether or not I had any talent. Not before each of the 13 stories in St Bart’s Way was published in a literary review or journal (to find out where, see my resume) did I realize I had a thematically linked collection. I am very  grateful to the editors of those journals and reviews for their support and encouragement and to Washington Writers’ Publishing House, which awarded  St. Bart's Way its 2015 fiction award and for publishing  these stories as a collection.  That award had a profound impact on how I regarded myself as a writer; it affirmed my sense of my own talent and reinforced my commitment.

In as much as they allow for more associative thinking than fiction does, essays are akin to book reviews.  The essay titled "What the World Needs Now," is a good example.   The situation, my seeing a wood duck in a tree near my home in West Baltimore,  would not lend itself to a short story, but the essay form works well to braid together such disparate elements as human widowhood and avian romance.  The essay form also allows my own voice to shine through, something which must be subsumed in fiction in defference to my fictional characters. The attached essays were written over a period of several years and their subjects range from the death of the brilliant Black poet Henry Dumas to polio. I am grateful to the editors who published them, thereby giving credence to my wide-ranging thoughts.  
      "Henry Dumas: Truths, Poetry and Memory," was a runner-up for nonfiction in a contest sponsored by the Chattahoochee Review in 2005; "Anonymous Told Me So" received an award from the League of American Pen Women, San Francisco Branch in 2011; and "Mort's Pen" received an award from the same organization in 2021.  "Skating to Seventy" was the first place winner for nonfiction sponsored by Winning Writers in 2011. 

Unlike the stories in my project titled St. Bart’s Way, the stories in this project have not been collected under one cover, although I hope that “In the Ullage” and “When Sister Joan Opens the Door” will form the basis for collection I am developing about the family of Teddy Holbrook, an alcoholic living in Baltimore. Beyond that, these stories are not linked either thematically or sytlistically.  However, I hope they do show the variety of the characters I write about and the breadth of the questions I explore.

Like those in St. Bart’s Road, all the stories in this project have been published or are forthcoming in a literary journal or review. They represent a diversity of settings and characters, ranging from an ex-con rehabbing a house to flip to a woman musing on decades of war.  

As a writer, what is delicious to me about short stories is their intensity: every word, every punctuation mark matters. Moreover, every word, every punctuation mark serves only one purpose: the furtherance of the story. No extraneous details, dialogue, or descriptions are permitted, not if the result is to be a unified, satisfying whole.

Achieving that unity challenges the writer to pare her language and focus her attention on her story’s essence, something that may not become apparent until she’s well along, because the foundation of all literary fiction is a theme, issue, or universal question operating beneath the surface action. Within a few thousand words the writer much create a world that’s as confounding yet as believable as any her readers experience in their day-to-day lives. I hope that the stories included in this project are evidence that capability.     
 

I began writing book reviews several years ago when Liz Rees, my first instructor in Johns Hopkins University's writing program, assigned my class the task of writing a review. That assignment resulted in my review of David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise being published in the Missouri Review. Twenty years later, more than two dozen reviews of mine have been published in journals as diverse as the Cincinnati Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Baltimore Review, and the Washington Independent Review of Books, where I am a regular contributor. I also have been an elected member of the National Book Critics Circle for many years. 

As I mentioned in my Writing Samples, writing book reviews is different from writing fiction: it taps into a different area of my brain, presents different challenges, and calls for different energy. Whichever book I’m asked to review, I always read  twice: once to follow the plot and characters as any reader would; and then a second time to takes notes about themes, structure, and technique.  

Once I sit down to write, I’ve already determined my review’s basic structure and starred the quotes I want to use.   And I write fairly quickly, a day or two at most. Also, I critique the work dispassionately.  My job as a critic is not to evaluate a book's subject matter, but how well the author has addressed that subject matter, since subject matter can be influenced by society’s caprice, but good writing endures.  Similarly, as I do with my short stories and essays, I strive to make certain that my  reviews employ the tropes any writer has in her or his toolbox, such as alliteration, simile, and varied sentence structure.   
              

I began writing op-ed pieces in my late thirties, when I had the good fortune to work with Gwin Owens at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.  When Gwin became editor of the editorial page of the Baltimore Evening Sun —yes, I am old enough to remember the Evening Sun — I began submitting pieces to him.  Gwin was a wonderful teacher: he rejected those pieces that were sloppy or off target, and accepted those where I hit the mark. And I’ve always been grateful to him for his judiciousness.  

When the Evening Sun folded, I focused my energy on writing feature articles, which were published in a variety of places.  Not until I turned to writing fiction in my fifties did I resume writing op-ed pieces because op-ed pieces are akin to fiction in as much as they demand vivid scenes and allow for joining together seemingly disparate ideas. Unlike fiction, however, op-ed peices permit the writer’s personality to shine through.  In fact, that is the essence of a good op-ed piece.

The topics included in this project range from the impact of political corruption to the Kentucky Derby. But taken together, they are representative of  my opinions and passions.  

On a rainy evening in May of 2006, I received a five-word email message that literally changed my life.  The email came Arcadia Publishing of South Carolina and it read: “Can you do Lexington Market?”  Arcadia is a publisher of pictorial local histories, and in 2006 they were looking for Baltimore writers who would work according to Arcadia’s tight deadlines and strict requirements. Arcadia’s contracts required authors to obtain 140 photographs, write all text, and lay out their books according to Arcadia’s established formula.

And so began the most intense three months of my life.  Writing Baltimore’s Lexington Market became an all-consuming task that demanded ferreting out sources of photos, cajoling their owners into letting me borrow them, or, in many cases paying to have them reproduced, and then grouping them into chapters to form an interesting narrative.

Writing Baltimore’s Lexington Market was challenging, but also satisfying. Many years later, I still feel privileged to have contributed to preserving the history of such a venerable Baltimore institution, and honored to have highlighted the entrepreneurial spirit of the market’s merchants. And I am grateful to Arcadia for introducing me to the ways of commercial publishing.  

I apologize if the images I selected for this project are not as clear as one would wish.
                                                                                                                                       

I was inspired to write What Child Is This? by a brief incident I experienced many years ago in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. While I did not include that incident in What Child Is This?, the racial divide I witnessed that morning forms the foundation for this murder mystery about two brothers, one of them white, the other Black.  What Child Is This? was a finalist for the 2021 Novel Slices Award, but it has not yet been published.  I am hoping that a Baker Award will give me added credibility with publishers. 

                                                                                                               Summary of What Child Is This?
 On the night Dr. Peter Farley returns to New Bristol, Pennsylvania, to celebrate his mother’s fiftieth birthday, his teenaged brother Joachim and Joachim’s best friend re-enact a horrific scene from American history and completely ruin the party. The next morning Peter discovers the friend’s body, and, when the police suspect Joachim, determines that he must discover the real killer.     

SYNOPSIS
THE BONES OF TWO
by
Patricia Schultheis, (410) 448-4211 [email protected]
 
The Bones of Two is a thriller, where every uncovered secret twists the plot tighter, and every plot twist propels the action and thrusts the characters into uncharted territory.  The story takes place in the present, but its roots are in the seventies, an era of collective craziness, when the Weathermen set off bombs on college campuses, the National Guard massacred a student at Kent State, and the Manson family murders were fresh in the nation’s consciousness.

  But all that unrest meant nothing to nine-year-old Douglas Gianni of Steubenville, Ohio. He’d had a great time at summer camp and was looking forward to finishing the plastic lanyards he made for his family when he got home.  Only no one came to pick him up: not his mother; not his father; not his breathtakingly beautiful sister, Melissa.   

Given the social upheaval of the times the police suspected that Melissa had killed her parents and ran away with Joey Kolpecki, the loser whose flashy red Firebird she’d been riding around in all summer. At least that was the assumption that Stan Petrovic, a veteran detective, and his inexperienced partner, Harry Specter, operated under until all their leads went cold.

Now, the excavation for a new gas pipeline has unearthed the bones of two: a man and a woman whose wedding bands identify them as Frank and Kathleen Gianni, Doug’s parents.  A middle school vice-principal in Baltimore County with a wife and two grown children when his parents' remains are unearthed, Doug returns to Steubenville to bury them. But the trip plunges him into emotional turmoil, and he feels his carefully constructed, middle-class life crumbling.  And worse, Doug feels the secret he’s been harboring for decades pushing to the surface. No one, not even his wife, knows that his beloved sister has been in contact with him. Never believing that Melissa had anything to with their parents’ disappearance, Doug becomes desperate to find her before the police do. His search takes him on an unexpected journey. He gains a truer understanding of the wealthy, influential uncle who adopted him, and of the thin veneer his own marriage has been operating under.     

Just as intent to find Melissa as Doug, is aging Harry Specter, whose recent cancer diagnosis has made him regard finding Melissa Gianni as his last worthwhile piece of police work.  But both Doug and Harry may be too late.

 Ever since she left Steubenville as pregnant fifteen-year-old, Melissa’s been living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, under the protection of a mafiosi, the godfather of her long-dead husband.  But the discovery of her murdered parents, which has its own mafia connection, has made Melissa radioactive—if the police find her, what other crimes will they uncover? What no-show construction contracts?  What rigged property records?  What compromised prison guards? Living a shadow life, Melissa finds, has cost her too much. The bones of her parents may have been silent, but they manage to tell her and her brother an unforgettable story.

The Bones of Two was a finalist for the 2020 Novel Slices Award and is represented by Victoria Skurnick of the Levine, Greenberg, Rostan Literary Agency.