Schmidt writes for Chicago Tribune
For English instructor Geoff Schmidt, publishing a poem or short story is old hat, but writing for the Chicago Tribune is a new challenge.
Schmidt’s first Tribune piece, an essay on selling a Raymond Carver letter over eBay, appeared Sept. 5 in the Sunday Book Section, and he’s scheduled for a review sometime in early October.
Schmidt met the Deputy Editor of the book section, Carolyn Alessio, through former IVCC instructor Katie Riegel and another mutual friend.
"She (Alessio) asked me to write an essay on something ‘writerly,’" Schmidt said.
The essay Schmidt produced described his feelings about selling a letter by one of his favorite authors and led Alessio to ask him to review three short story collections.
"It’s been interesting for me as a writer," Schmidt said. "Working with a set word count after so long, and being forced to consider specific audiences, purposes, and forms made me realize that all that stuff I tell my students is actually, you know, true.
"Until these assignments (for the Tribune), I’d always thought of myself as a fiction writer and poet and thought about audience and purpose and form in very different ways."
Schmidt, who has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Alabama, received the Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in 1998 for a short story, "The Corrupter of Words." He was awarded special mention in The Pushcart Prizes in 1991 for "What Ever Happened to Jack Ruby’s Dogs," and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 1993 and 1995.