Patricia Roth Schwartz was born in Charleston, WV on Columbus Day in 1946. She has also lived in Southern California and New England: Hartford CT for 15 years and Boston for 10. Schwartz holds a BA in English composition from Mount Holyoke College, an MA in English literature from Trinity College (CT), and a MA in counseling psychology from Antioch/ New England Graduate School. She currently resides in Waterloo, in the Finger Lakes Region of Central NY, where she moved in 1991, with her partner, Sandy Zohari, and their poodle, Rory, on their 35 acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, where she writes poems, plays, and fiction, cultivates herb, perennial and rock gardens, and feeds the birds. She has taken early retirement from part-time community college teaching in NY, and (previously in New England), the full-time practice of holistic psychotherapy. Now she focuses on writing, herbalism, cooking, artwork, photography, hiking, biking, and kayaking, travel, and literary projects/publishing.
really life..."
you'd perch in that room that really after his
insurance adjustor day belonged to your father:
his den, because he had painted it the green
of a forest, upholstered himself an old easy
chair in burgundy fabric, hung in the window
by a thread a glass jewel that splattered
rainbows all over the forest walls. Permitted
to use his small desk, still in your scratchy
school dresses, dark plaid, white at the neck,
you'd bend down over notebook paper with fine
colored pencils, copying from field guides all of
the birds of West Virginia, males only: female
plumage so drab, their markings plain. Your
favorite
was the State Bird, the tufted titmouse, later
changed
by decree to the cardinal, disappointing you
who so
loved the little titmouse, modest yet unique,
unlike
the flashier cardinal claimed by several states.
You loved West Virginia, too—its map so
much fancier than the plain rectangles of Iowa
or Wyoming--and often drew it: those curving
outlines that spoke of rivers, the two
panhandles,
one skinny and tall, the other chunky and
broad.
Then you'd nestle down into your father's chair
with its rows of brass tacks neatly hammered
in
where fabric edges met scarred wood. You'd
read
Heidi over and over, then the next year all the
Nancy
Drews in order of publication, despairing
missing titles
had to be skipped over. After supper the room
became
again his eyrie. He'd urge you not to copy the
birds
but to draw them freehand, not understanding
how
that way they could not possibly be good
enough.
He'd praise your poems but correct them too,
explaining iambic pentameter, quoting Poe 'til
you
cried. So you would break apart, as if slapped,
both
of you bewildered. He'd sink into his favorite,
The Life
of DaVinci. The walls of the bedroom you
shared
with your sister still papered with a cowboy
motif
the house had come with, the space down the
middle
divided by an imaginary line you had drawn,
you
had to join her lying on the floor filling in
cartoon
characters with her Crayolas in the living room
where
your mother, mending, also sat--the three of
you
seeming so much like the birds your notebook
never
included, the ones nature insisted remain
invisible.
(published in Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in Poems)
Teaching: Pat conducts workshops for The Writers & Books Literary Center, Inc., in Rochester, and other organizations. She often conducts workshops for writers' groups funded by Poets & Writers, Inc. She founded and volunteers as the sole facilitator for the Poetry Workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, NY, which has been meeting since summer 2001. Previously Schwartz worked part-time in the Inmate Higher Education Program (IHEP) at Cayuga Correctional Facility in Moravia NY, teaching college classes, until the program was cut by the state of New York. In June of 2008 she was designated "Volunteer of the Year" at Auburn Correctional.
Published in Journals: Her work has been published in Olive Trees, The Lyric, Sojourner, Plainswoman, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Creative Woman, Backbone, The Distillery, Blueline, Confrontation, Confluence, Phantasmagoria, Exit-On Line, The Women's Review of Books, Nimrod, Clackamas Literary Review, Litchfield Review, Lullwater Review, Iron Horse, Friendly Women: a Quaker Journal, Pinnacle Hill Review, South Carolina Review, Cape Rock, Square Lake, Gargoyle, Le Mot Juste, Sow's Ear, Madison Review, Palo Alto Review, HeartLodge, Ellipsis, Sea Stories, The Canadian Arachnologist, Off the Coast, Chaffin, and Clare.
Published in Anthologies: Her poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: Rochester Poets for Peace 2000; Summer Songs; In a Mirror: Women on Women; Common Intuitions: Poems on Women; In the Arms of Words: Poets for Disaster Relief; and The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets Write on Endangered Species. Schwartz was selected as a Finalist for the Willamette Poetry Award from Clackamas for the 2004 Fall/Winter Issue and as a Finalist in both the Sow's Ear 2004 Poetry Contest and Rochester's ImageOut poetry contests for 2002 and 2003. She received 2nd place in Heart Lodge's 2006 contest.
Readings: Pat appears frequently in reading series, at coffeehouses, bookstores, festivals, and other venues. She has been featured twice in the Genesee Reading Series in Rochester. She founded and co-coordinated a Summer Poetry Festival for The Gell Center of Writers & Books in Bristol, NY, held for three years, plus a poetry reading series at Fairport Coffee House, Fairport, NY. In March 2008, she was one of five NY state women poets selected to read from their own work in conjunction with pieces by women composers presented during the "Women in Music Festival" at The Eastman School of Music in Rochester. She was one of twenty greater Rochester area poets selected in June 2008 to perform at "Reading for Relief," a benefit for earthquake and cyclone victims.
Book-Length Publications: Her volume of poetry, Hungers, was published in 1979 by The Blue Spruce Press, a collective of four women poets from the greater Hartford area in CT. Her volume of short fiction, The Names of the Moons of Mars, was published in 1989 by New Victoria Publishers and won a Lambda Literary Award. Pat served as both a contributor and co-editor of Knocking on the Silence: Poems Inspired by the Finger Lakes (FootHills 2005).
Her own full-length collection, Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poems was published in 2005, and her chapbook, Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in 2007, both also by FootHills.
Theatre Performances: Her play, "Weeding for Isabelle," based on her own family history, was given a staged reading through the Plays-In-Progress program of greater Rochester in June of 2008.
Her work The Crows of Copper John: a History of Auburn Prison in Poems has been performed twice as a readers' theatre: for the benefit of CEPHAS House at Downstairs Cabaret in Rochester, and at Auburn Public Theatre. This manuscript is also pursuing publication as a full-length book.
To order any of these books, go to My Books
