"Hello, Poetry Lovers!"
-- Bullwinkle the Moose
MICHAEL SCHEIN is a writer who lives in Seattle with his wife and daughters and a pride of cats. MICHAEL SCHEIN is also Executive Director of Tieton Arts and Humanities, and a member of the Board of the Washington Poets Association. But, most importantly, MICHAEL SCHEIN has a cat sleeping on his lap right now.
I write poetry and historical novels. My most recent novel, The Burial Canoe, follows the battle of wills between Chief Leschi and Governor Stevens that led to the Puget Sound Indian War of 1855-56. My first novel, Just Deceits, recounts a scandalous trial of wealthy Richard Randolph and his sister-in-law, Nancy, who were defended against the charge of infanticide by John Marshall and Patrick Henry. I have also written book reviews, stories and essays, such as Tech Support Hell, which is reproduced here in full. My work has won shiny gold stars and decoder rings, and been nominated for a 2008 Pushcart, which isn't actually a cart. I will cheerfully buy beers for agents or editors, unless they are named MICHAEL SCHEIN.
Please write with comments, ideas, inspirations & responses to my work. Writing is lonely without you, dear reader. Experience is deepened when shared. Thank-you!
When not writing or working on Tieton Arts & Humanities or the WPA, I practice law and volunteer as a speaker for the ACLU. It is important that all Americans who love their country speak out against the barbarism of our current leadership, so I have added a political section to this website, entitled PoliTicks. Although the political process is inherently destructive of the gentler values of kindness, empathy and mercy, nonetheless we need to participate so that we do not leave it solely to those who can justify the killing of innocents as mere "collateral damage." As Yeats wrote in his brilliant and prophetic poem, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When the worst are full of passionate intensity, the rest of us must act on our conviction! Please visit PoliTicks.