What the Critics Say
About Barbara Schmitz
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Barbara has a huge mind — it took her a long time on her own arduous path to capture
its extent from ground to heaven. But never fear, she was a midwesterner — she
stubbornly continued until the paper reflected her true self ... she launched a rocket
all the way to eternity. — Natalie Goldberg
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How to Get Out of the Body
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Schmitz is so extremely fearless and honest that it makes one wonder what she would choose to leave out of her work, if anything. ... While this could make some people uneasy, we must applaud such fearlessness. — Melissa Prokop, Nebraska Territory |
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Lives of the Saints
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The Lives of the Saints grew out of my spiritual practice working
with the Sufi Wazifa (Mantra) YA RAHMAN.
This is one of the attributes (99 names of ALLAH) of the divine--repeating
it is supposed to evoke compassion. Shortly after I began the practice
it's as if I
heard these various voices asking for their stories to be told--not
literally exactly more like an insistent memory that kept pesteriing me
until
I let each one of them speak what they needed to say. One, the surviving
nurse in the Richard
Speck case, I had to go to the library to look up (I barely remembered it).
After I'd done the poem, things appeared in the newspapers and I realized
it was the anniversary of the mass murders. The woman
who killed her children poem never worked until I let her speak
instead of me telling about it. I see this manuscript as a speaking up,
speaking out for those lives that need to be recognized with compassion.
from the author
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