Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover by Jan Schmidt

                  jebb CC


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*Poetry fragments by JD Rage. Used with permission of the JD Rage Literary Estate

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
Short story by Jan Schmidt*


   As I walk up Avenue B, I’ve got a death-grip on this crappy Rite Aid plastic bag—full of Aunt Chloe’s fentanyl patches. Though I’d like to sell or use these miracles of release-from-reality, I’m planning to drop them off at the pharmacy’s disposal kiosk. Last month, three days after my thirtieth birthday, Aunt Chloe died, and because I lived only two blocks away, my mom picked me to clean out her apartment. 
   I first met Aunt Chloe when I was a kid—my parents said she was a Demon Child, and whenever I did some headstrong thing, my dad said I was just like her. Even so, they let me hang out with her when I was a teenager and she’d take me to her arty Lower East Side clubs, which I alternately thought totally cool or tragically old school. Still, I really loved Aunt Chloe. 
  Cars whiz by, honk, a motorcycle roars, and the wind whips an empty soda bottle into the gutter, but at the corner of Third Street a human clamor drowns out the street sounds. Two new restaurants—more expensive than me or my friends can afford—have outdoor tables that are packed with people my age drinking Bloody Marys and Mimosas. Aunt Chloe often told me, with epic scorn, how thirty years ago these folks wouldn’t have set foot in this area. In the 80s, taxi drivers dropped her off on First Avenue, afraid to enter Alphabet    City, which she said was a land of drug dealing and murder. Of course, like me, these Millennials weren’t even born then. 
   The pharmacy’s on First Avenue and 15th Street, eleven blocks north and two long Avenue blocks west, a twenty minute walk. In this dangling plastic bag are ten—count ‘em—ten boxes of fentanyl, each with five 100 mg  patches. They’re burning through my gray matter. Obsession. That’s fifty fentanyl patches. Though I plan to recycle them—Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle—right now, I want to Reuse. Though Reusing Opioids may not be what the eco-activists had in mind. Still, won’t you be comforted to know that while I’m getting blitzed I’ll be observing correct environmental standards? 
   But really, I keep rocking the math. I saw an article two days ago that said street value is $300 to $400 a pop, and I have fifty patches, so that’s a smooth $1,500 to $2,000. Wait a minute. Check it again. That’s $15,000, maybe $20,000. But what if the people I sell to overdose? With my history not so likely, since every drug dealing venture from my past had me using the whole supply. On the other hand, what if I had  an extra twenty thousand to spend? Maybe the article I read had bad data and it wasn’t worth that much. Still, gotta be worth a wad of cheddar.
   Then Aunt Chloe took me to recovery meetings when I was twenty, so I now have over ten years sobriety and can’t be selling or using. Though I never had a legal drink, I started shooting heroin when I was seventeen. I was wild and out of my mind, but now, after ten years, sobriety if I use, I lose. Still the fentanyl is calling me. Like this corny Paul Simon song Aunt Chloe used to sing—so out of character from her usual punk anarchist anthems--the problem is all inside your head. I’d even join her, wailing along, I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free / there must be fifty ways to leave your lover." 
   Fifty ways for fifty fentanyl patches. A voice in my head starts talking to me, the one I call Silver-Tongued Junkie, St. Junkie. I like this name because it reminded me of characters in books by William Burroughs and Henry Miller that Aunt Chloe got me to read. St. Junkie doesn’t say a word now, simply shows me a slo-mo GIF: Tip of a syringe breaks skin. A sharp stab. Needle searches, drop of red releases up into calibrated barrel, plunger plunges me down, under the waters of consciousness, radiating into muscles, mind, memory. Divine light of morphine. Oxy. Heroin. Fentanyl. Eyes half closed, mouth half open. 
   Once he’s activated my Demon Child, St. Junkie seduces me with some compelling arguments: You deserve this fentanyl. After all these deaths, all this cleaning out of apartments, you need relief. Pain relief. 
   Gotta take something that’s free—it’s a gift from the universe, I think. Then my Chloe-From-The-Beyond voice counters: This is why they tell you in meetings to not go alone to dump someone’s drugs. Always take another person in recovery with you. I get it. I should have someone with me, I know, I know, but really, I’m fine. 
   Chloe-From-The-Beyond says: Right, you’re fine. Call someone. Get someone to see that you get to that drug store. 
   But, Aunt Chloe, I say to her directly, your Demon Child is in me too.

                                                                                                       You just slip out the back, Jack

   I was just a kid, barely ten, when Aunt Chloe took me to my first scuzzy downtown hipster place, ABC No Rio on Rivington Street. Mom said Aunt Chloe’s poems were too dark for her, too full of death and rage, Black Magic and devils, but mom let me go with her. I sat with all these old people, most still in their black leather. But Aunt Chloe was special. Once on that makeshift stage in that dingy basement she performed. This was her element. Long dyed black hair fell over her eyes and old-school Sex Pistols and Clash buttons dotted her black leather vest. And her poems were dark, like mom said, all death, love of death, and begging death for release. At ten, I didn’t get it, but I saw Aunt Chloe as the center of a universe, as she stormed around the stage. From folding chairs, anyone could see the jaunty skeletons and magic horse tattoos on her arms. She fixed us with her eyes—Aunt Chloe had some spooky eyes—and cried out: HUNGRY: I WANT TO SWALLOW AN ELEPHANT, / INGEST A LEOPARD SKIN COAT, AND A / PANTHER AND A CADILLAC, AND A CONTOUR / BED, AND ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH / OF HEROIN. 
   Damn, I miss my Aunt Chloe. Even though I was pretty embarrassed by all her emoting back then.
   After I went to the lame funeral for Aunt Chloe my folks put on upstate—so unlike Aunt Chloe, no crazy out-of-their-minds artists and recovery friends, only family and a scary preacher guy—I began to clean her apartment, starting with her refrigerator. When I pulled open Aunt Chloe’s vegetable drawer, I got a shock. The plastic bin was crammed with little bottles of insulin. I called my sponsor, who had a pharmacist friend. She came over, looked at the stash, and said the insulin was not expired. It was around $10,000 worth of insulin, she said, and she took those bottles to give to people who couldn’t afford it. We combed through drawers all over Aunt Chloe’s apartment and located hundreds of yellow plastic vials full of expired and unexpired heart, bone, and diabetes-related medications, and vitamins. We opened the containers and dumped the pills into a large clear recycle bag that was three-quarters full when we mixed in coffee grounds, which she told me was the way to dispose of pills. Aunt Chloe’s prescriptions had piled up because, for the last six months, she’d been shuttled between hospitals and rehabs, but never stayed at any place long enough to stop her prescriptions. She said money-grubbing insurance companies sent her into a bureaucratic hell-hole of phone calls, faxes, and more doctor visits to get them started again, especially for pain meds.
   Aunt Chloe had stockpiles of everything. Under her bed I found a huge plastic bin full of colostomy supplies. From drawers and cabinets, I pulled out boxes of poetry, two-inch audiotapes of her punk band from the 80s, and paintings—all these her literary executor carted off. I invited her friends to take books, CDs, record albums, nearly a thousand crazy cow and horse figurines, a computer (after my mom came down and we figured out her password and downloaded her files), jewelry, and leather jackets she’d painted with skulls, skeletons, and her heroes Sid Vicious and Jack Kerouac. It was only after the pharmacist lady left that I found the ten boxes of fentanyl patches behind the plates in Aunt Chloe’s kitchen cabinet. I immediately wanted to try one, but I resisted. Instead, I googled how to dispose of them and found this pharmacy I’m now heading for.
   As I walk up Avenue B, I hear in my head Aunt Chloe declaiming one of my favorite poems. Even when she was sick, her voice was strong and bad-ass. Death is a prolific painter / when it is done with one canvas / it starts a million more / I wonder if death is really just a brush with life. Even though I’m decades younger than Aunt Chloe, I now get this. I’ve had a bunch of friends die: my bestie Lizzie, a meth head, overdosed in her mom’s bathroom; my ex-boyfriend Teddy, studying geology at NYU, cut his wrists then hung himself; a trans friend with the most glorious long red hair, threw herself in front of the A train. 
   Too much death. It’s a good thing Aunt Chloe was never shy about telling me, or anyone, she was an addict, or that she was diagnosed with bi-polar something-or-other in her late teens. When I finally admitted I had a problem with heroin, she was the only person I felt I could tell. She took me to a meeting. Then when I had just over a year sober, Aunt Chloe got sick and the hits kept on coming: cancers, brain tumors, back issues, and diabetes and its related horrors. She lived in terrible physical pain, taking her medications as prescribed, though every day she beat back her desire to kill the agony with just a little extra. 
   This makes me angry and sad, but I don’t need to be furious and sorrowful to want to wipe out my consciousness. Two years ago, on my way to a meeting to celebrate my eighth anniversary, I was excited, happy. Walking by a liquor store I’d passed many times before, I glanced in the window at sparkling, green and brown bottles. A new cheery voice inside me said, Eight years sober? Go ahead, you can have a drink. 
   Shocked, I rushed to the meeting. A friend handed me an anniversary card from a boutique recovery store that sold its own greeting cards. She pressed her finger on its printed message. It’s been a blessing to watch you’re recovery. She pointed at it again, laughing, and I saw the grammatical error. She said she told the woman who ran the store and she said she was aware, but their copyeditor relapsed, so mistakes were slipping through.
   When the meeting started, we were still smiling, saying yes, you are recovery. A woman named Mary announced that she had two days back from a relapse. She’d had twenty-two years sober, cut back on meetings, then one day at a party, without thinking, she found a drink in her hand. My heart jumped. That was three years ago, she said, and she couldn’t stay stopped for more than a week. A fear gripped me, a fear I needed.
   At that same meeting, a cute guy my age said he was coming up on his third anniversary; he added that the first year was about not picking up, and the second was about not picking up a gun. Snickers of empathy all around. But, he continued, “to not shoot myself or you is triumphant. TRIUMPHANT. I’m not going to a shelter or food pantry, I’m going to a job and my own apartment. And I have people in my life who are willing to be with me, to connect with me.” This made me want to connect, full body connect. He smiled back at me when I gave him the look. We went on a few dates, but he was mad crazy, even too much for me.
   As I get to the corner of Fifth Street and Avenue B, a flock of birds on a rooftop fly off. They head in one direction, then curve around, darkened bodies against a blue sky, and then they land again on the same building they started out from. I wonder why. To eat insects? To get exercise? They’re bored? Is there a message for me in their movement? They keep circling back to the beginning. 
   Aunt Chloe was in the hospital on her thirty-third anniversary and, as I did each year since I got sober, I gave her a coin with roman numerals. XXXIII. That number, she explained, was the “perfect master number,” though I couldn’t exactly follow her lecture on numerology. Later in hospice, she died grasping that coin. I keep it on my keychain. 
   This keychain rustles in my pocket as I’m heading to the pharmacy with all this fentanyl. Can’t I just keep one box? If I lose my clean time, so what? If I lived through the fentanyl, I’d die in my apartment, unable to stop the vodka and drugs. That should make me afraid. But it doesn’t. I need to be afraid. I need Chloe-From-The-Beyond to wash my brain, clean out those death-defying desires. St. Junkie interrupts: Oh shut up. Turn around, go home, take those patches with you.

                                                                                                              Make a new plan, Stan

   Around Sixth Street, with the fentanyl still talking to me, it hits me: What if the police stop me? I’ve taken all Aunt Chloe’s prescription labels off the boxes. Will they think I’m buying or selling? Suddenly I’m a teenager again, walking around with a bundle of dope in my pocket. I remember cops hassling me, doped up, acting crazy. But now, I’m upstanding, clean hair, clothes on point. They’d pass me right by, ordinary Millennial with a plastic Rite Aid bag. 
   My phone rings. It’s Mekka. She asks where I am. I tell her and she says she’ll meet me on Seventh Street and Avenue B to give me the twenty she owes me. “If I don’t give it to you now, I’ll spend it.” This is the twenty we keep passing back and forth. One week I borrow it from her, the next she borrows it from me.
   I’m looking forward to seeing Mekka’s smiling, dimpled, Demon Child face. I’ll have to hang on Seventh for five minutes, but she’s worth the wait. We got clean together, ten years ago. A crack smoker with at least four felonies, she probably still knows where I could get a good price for these drugs. Of course, I’d rather not end up sharing a cell with her. I wonder what she and Aunt Chloe would have thought of each other if they’d ever met.
   One thing Mekka knows, because I’ve told her, is that Aunt Chloe took me to my first meeting. When I dropped out of high school, my parents screamed at me, but Aunt Chloe never yelled, just kept on being sober in front of me. Then when I told Aunt Chloe I needed help, she didn’t lecture, only told me some of her crazy stories about guns to her head and overdosing, and that, after twenty years, she lost the war. She said her life changed in recovery: she started a literary magazine, won a ton of poetry slams, got promoted to some top spot at the law office where she worked. The meeting she took me to was full-speed insanity, just what I needed. In the middle they did this thing where the addicts lined up for a hug and a chip, while the other addicts in their seats clapped, stomped their feet, and yelled: “Keep Coming Back. Keep Coming Back.” I didn’t understand anything, but I was entertained. I got a crew my age and we hung out, made fun of everyone, laughed till our stomachs hurt. After a year, Aunt Chloe helped me get my GED. Then I got an internet marketing job. It pays the bills, but it’s a soulless place, so I’m going back to school. I got accepted at Hunter. I have a plan—if I don’t fuck it all up again. 
   There’s Mekka walking up Seventh Street. Small frame, intense glare, purposeful stride, hair cut so close she’s almost bald. When she arrives, she’s breathless, her face drained, not her usual high voltage. I ask, “What’s going on? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
   “Two clients at the shelter where I work died of overdoses yesterday. One in the shelter, one around the corner.” Mekka, totally upset, holds an unlit cigarette in her shaking hand. She hasn’t smoked for nearly a month. Not since we took the bus to Boston to see the Mad Russian who did something like hypnosis, but not hypnosis, to cure addictions like smoking. She sees me eye her cigarette and says, “I had to smoke when they carried that first girl past me in the body bag.” As if to prove her need, she lights the cigarette, though usually she doesn’t smoke in front of me. She tells me more about the police coming to the shelter, everyone crying. Young girls dead. That sets me off. We both need what I have in this bag. 
   Chloe-From-The-Beyond tells me quietly, pain is important, signals you to take your hand out of the fire, to call a doctor, to see a psychiatrist. 
   St. Junkie butts in. Sometimes you need drugs to block the pain. 
   I tell Mekka I’m holding Aunt Chloe’s fentanyl patches—I’m half asking for support from a fellow recovery person, half asking for help in using or redistributing them. She immediately says we need to sell them. 
   “In fact, I should just hit you on the head and take them.” She’s not shaking now. That’s the old Mekka. Her joking, or half-joking, clears my head and I laugh, say these are going back to where they came from. Then Mekka says she’s late and pulls a twenty from her jeans pocket. Hands it to me. 
   Suddenly I’m swooped up to a rooftop across the street. I see a Black woman, who did eight years in prison, handing money to a white woman holding a Rite Aid bag full of drugs. Sirens wail, lights flash, blue and white cars swerve to a stop. Cops jump out. Say they witnessed the exchange of money. What’s in the bag? That’s how the fentanyl came, not to be recycled, but to be evidence. We are evidence, too, but our systems, our blood, our breath, all clean.

                                                                                                         You don't need to be coy, Roy

   No cops, no arrests. Only my paranoid fantasies. Though it could have happened and it could have been a disaster, but I’m working on a disaster of my own, though it hasn’t happened yet and I’ve still got that plastic bag of fentanyl as I walk through Tompkins Square Park. Aunt Chloe told me this was once home to the homeless, a place that sparked riots and ended with a curfew and gentrification. Elm trees all around, at least those that survived the elm bark beetles, so Aunt Chloe said—she had some serious knowledge knocking around that funky brain of hers. 
   Walking by the area where the band shell used to be, I look up at the trees—such amazing shapes, all different, all striking and fantastic. Every time I passed this way with Aunt Chloe, she’d lament that they tore down the band shell. Her band played on its stage and later she did poetry readings there. I can almost hear her raving about death, but also about magic, everyday miracles, connections. She’d always return to horrors. And, she roared, humanity’s battles with evil persisted throughout time and continue every day—even, she’d say, in her personal life—and she’d list jealous women who’d cursed her and nasty boyfriends who’d swindled her, one who threatened to drown her dog in the toilet. She’d tried to drown those evils with Jack Daniels, suffocate them with heroin. 
   I pass the dog park. Big Dog section: St. Bernards, Afghans, Dobermans, setters, long hair to no hair, all colors. Small Dog section: Jack Russells, Chihuahuas, Maltese, long hair to no hair, all colors. People: all sizes, all ages, long hair to no hair, all colors. They toss balls to their pets, take sticks out of the dog’s teeth, stop them from humping each other. A kid whizzes by on a bike, barely misses plowing into me. 
   St. Junkie says, turn the freak around and take these drugs home. Like those elm beetles, these fentanyl patches burrow into my gray matter, plant a fungus that colonizes my brain. 
   Chloe-From-The-Beyond counters with another story that doesn’t seem to make much sense as an argument, but it distracts me. Aunt Chloe used to love to describe waiting in a line of addicts in an abandoned lot on Eleventh Street. Rotting couch, planks of wood to keep them from the mud, old TVs, garbage bags, tossed out clothing. Waiting for the dealers to return, teenage steerers keeping them under control with non-stop patter: We’ll be re-upping any minute. When they come, keep it movin’.  No singles, no shorts. And I loved to remind her we didn’t wait in line anymore: we ordered online. 
   Another Aunt Chloe story that stuck with me wasn’t one of her death-defying tales, but a simple anecdote from back in the 1980s. She’d set out a large sticky trap in the “dump she paid to live in” and caught a rat, the size of a 22 sneaker. Alive, attached to the trap, it jumped all over her kitchen. She called a girlfriend who came over and together they stood around, two dope fiends, arguing about what to do. Finally they stuck an empty plastic garbage can over the rat. Then, as the rat rocked the container, they used a board to stick under the can and turn it right side up. Now what? Long addict discussion. Kill it, they decided. By drowning. In boiling water. While they heated the water, the rat, stuck to the trap, kept rattling the can around the kitchen. Finally they poured steaming water over the screeching animal and left it on the sidewalk. They left a note: Dead Rat Inside. Then added a drawing, since they couldn’t remember the Spanish word for rat. 
   I could so see her doing that. She also told sober stories, much like mine, full of laughter, joking, eyeing up handsome-bad-boys in the meetings. Keep Coming Back. 
   St. Junkie says, keep coming back to that fentanyl. 
  I think of Aunt Chloe in the hospital, a few years after I got clean. Cancer treatments had burnt out her colon, and the temporary colostomy bag they gave her became, in a move by the universe too horrible for reality, permanent. Freakin’ killed me. She ended up being at war with her body. Pain everywhere. 
   St. Junkie says, in this plastic bag, pain relief. 
   Chloe-From-The-Beyond responds, there will never be enough.
   By the dog run, I see Nestor. He’s a big, tattooed body-builder, Aunt Chloe’s friend, way older than me. He stops, tells me that in a week he’ll celebrate his thirtieth anniversary sober, says she took him to his first meeting. He misses her, owes his life to her. 
   Near the dog run, a huge elm tree’s trunk invites me to curl up in its fat twisting roots with rippling leathery bark. Its branches lean low, spread wide like a dancer’s fingers. Spring green leaves flutter as these trees—beautiful ladies wearing long dresses flaring out at the roots, raise their twisting arms, spiraling upward, to the blue blue sky. Foliage rustles and hums. Leaves murmur softly, sparkle, twinkle green and silver, twirl in the sun, a dazzling splendor spreads over the lawn. Magic. On the grassy knoll sunbathers stretch out on blankets. Another of Aunt Chloe’s voices whispers softly from the beyond: I understand. With the breeze kissing my skin, I close my eyes and flashes of purple, red, and blue surge in my vision. Birds warble, dogs bark, air rumbles low and crackles. My body vibrates, blood rushes through my veins, a divine beam of light radiates from within. Color, sound, and warmth swirl into a cosmic ecstasy as the earth spins beneath my feet. I am enough. I have enough. 

                                                                                                               Hop on the bus, Gus.

   Post Miracle-of-the-Trees, I’m still heading to that pharmacy. Between Avenue A and First Avenue, Fourteenth Street is full of contradictions: crusty nail salon, small dusty bodega, workman carrying loads to new construction sites, and they all butt up against the sparkling new Target and Trader Joe’s—places Aunt Chloe said were unthinkable for this area thirty years ago. Sitting on the sidewalk, a man leans against a store front and drinks his beer. Slams the bottle down. Oh, no. It’s Steve. He had six months sober. As I pass, he looks through me, eyes bleary and lifeless. In front of a small used clothing store, a bouquet of roses and a cardboard sign are propped up. Someone must have died. Scrawls across ripped cardboard read R.I.P. Star. Star? I’d see her on this block asking for money, roaming back and forth on this tiny stretch of the world. Probably not even twenty years old. Now she’s gone. A guy staring at the sign speaks to everyone and no one, says he saw her lying there yesterday, dead, not covered, hair falling over the sidewalk, cops all around. Just lying there. 
   At Fourteenth Street and First Avenue, stop lights attempt to create order as cars whoosh by; people dart in and out, texting or talking on cell phones, earplugs rendering them as oblivious as junkies. In my hand, my precious bag with fentanyl patches that I’m about to recycle. No, turn around, bring those patches home. I tell St. Junkie to dead it, but he doesn’t stop. The obsession with using has been lifted, but it keeps returning, though somehow, someway, I keep not doing its bidding.
   At the pharmacy, I face aisles of lotions, make-up, birthday cards. Through the pain relief aisle I follow signs to the drop-off box, plastic bag clutched in my hand, gripping it like a rifle in an NRA fanatic’s hand. In the corner sits a blue metal recycle bin. Above, directly focused on it is a camera. They’ll be recording me as I deposit these drugs. 
   I pull the slot down to stuff the whole bag in at once, but it only opens wide enough for a single box. I take out box number one. Should kiss it good-bye. The freedom inside. Aunt Chloe inside. My desires inside--cunning, baffling, insidious. I let the box go, have to give it a push, then hear it tumble, settle at the bottom. Will somebody watch the video to see who jettisoned all this fentanyl? Will they want to find me? Interrogate me? I drop box number two into the bin. I should keep at least one box. For sickness. For pain. I drop box number three. Really? I have ten boxes. I glance at the pharmacist behind me, she turns back to her computer. I drop box number four. That’s almost half. Keep at least one. There goes number five.
   I stand, head bowed before this metal box, and see myself open a package, remove an individually-wrapped patch, pull it apart, and yank off the protective backing. Where should I put it? Shoulder? Upper arm? That’s where Aunt Chloe had hers. Back? Stomach? Maybe I should give up, plaster my body in fentanyl patches. Oh Aunt Chloe, I watched your recovery, I watched you suffer and die. Sing with me: There’s fifty ways to leave your lover.

                                                                                        Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free

   A year has passed since those boxes disappeared into that disposal kiosk and still, visions of fentanyl dance in my head. I’m home, sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee, too spent to fix a sandwich. Why didn’t I keep at least one box? Did I make a choice when I dumped those patches? Does anyone ever really have a choice? In a meeting yesterday, a friend talked about her niece, dead of a fentanyl overdose, my age, with three children. A man announced his anniversary. Thirty-five years. If I can do it, you can do it. He said he still sometimes felt like he might collapse, but knew to go to a meeting, because the opposite of addiction is connection. After him a guy about my age said a week ago he and three friends split two bags in Tompkins Square, hoping it would be enough to get a little high. Two bags, I thought, there’s no way that would that be enough to get one person high. Next thing he knew, EMT workers were spraying Narcan in his nose. Beside him, one friend woke up. Two didn’t. 
   Even as I tell St. Junkie to shut the fuck up, I keep seeing those patches. I’m hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Obsession. Aunt Chloe and me in love with opioids. Oblivion. Our lives are a record of love and hate. St. Junkie stalks me everywhere—and I’m still half in love with him. But there’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover. It’s back and forth. Death is life on life’s terms. So are miracles. Angels and Demons keep fighting. No winner or loser. Détente. ​
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Jan Schmidt, recently appointed Consulting Prose Editor for online literary magazine Witty Partition, has had fiction published in The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story. IKON, and New York Stories. With J.D. Rage, she co-edited Venom Press and its quarterly poetry and fiction magazine, Curare, for eight years. Her manuscript for Sunlight Underground was a finalist in the 2021 Novel Slices Award. Her short story collection Collateral Regeneration was a finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2019. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. You can find her at janschmidt-writer.com

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