HeyJaredRebecca Simone Schmitz
Writer–musician. Recovering perfectionist. Poet. Geek chic. Funny girl.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 16, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 19, 2026
Latest issues
Life in the Key of No (opens the original)
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There’s an absurdity to being sick and having to work so hard at being sick.You refresh the pharmacy webpage. You call. You get disconnected. You call again and instantly get put on hold. You put the call on speaker so you can accomplish something else while you wait, which is when, natch, your cell phone dies.You charge the phone. You call again.This is work. You are working.You keep track of the medication that is supposed to make you feel better while it is, in fact, making you feel wors
From My Diaries: “What Separates Us From Animals” (opens the original)
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I was working as a patient attendant in a hospital when I cared for an elderly man. He told me he had been involved in one of the atomic bomb missions of World War II. His wife was there. She confirmed his story.At the top of my notebook page, I did the math to figure out how old he was.I asked if I could write down some of what he told me.“To be honest with you,” he said, “humans keep poking into parts of the world looking for places to live. We keep killing each other, but we’ve always done th
I Couldn’t Write This Love Poem Until I Heard Its Music (opens the original)
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🎧 Listen to this Dispatch:I’ve been trying to write a love poem about one of my first great loves for a long time. I’ve got pages on pages of drafts, memories, notes, hooks.Last Friday, I took another run at it. She. Just. Wouldn’t. After five hours of pages started and abandoned, I quit poking at it for the day.A few days later, a single line that had been tapping me on the shoulder for months reappeared, basically doing the can-can dance in my head til I stopped to listen to
My Vermont (opens the original)
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I love prose poems—the way they disguise themselves inside paragraphs while quietly doing everything a poem does. You get the momentum and intimacy of prose while bringing poetry’s concentration to sound, image, rhythm, compression, and surprise. Without line breaks announcing this is a poem, the language has to create its own music. I’m a musician, so this speaks to me.“My Vermont” came straight from my mind during the train ride it describes, and its movement felt perfectly suited to the prose
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