Eric Schless expects to receive his M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University in the Spring of 2024. It took him a while to get there.

 

     As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Eric majored in English and history and wrote for the university newspaper.   Some of his favorite professors encouraged him to pursue a career as a writer.   But after contemplating a writer’s life, he instead crossed the mountains to the west of Charlottesville and attended law school at Washington & Lee. 

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     For five long years, he practiced law, then Wall Street called.  He spent thirty years as an investment banker, working primarily with global transportation and logistics companies.  He immersed himself in the world of railroads, trucking, air freight, warehousing, the supply chains.  He obtained a lot of visas, made countless boardroom presentations, and developed close friendships with colleagues, clients and counterparts at other firms.  Long plane rides provided ideal opportunities to read, mostly fiction and history.  Occasionally, his mind wandered back to creative writing, and he would scribble a few paragraphs in a journal that his daughter had given him, or on the back of a draft of a power point that an analyst had shoved in his briefcase.  But those dalliances were few and far between.

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     With retirement came the opportunity to finally put pen to paper.
 

     Eric’s writing seeks to incorporate a strong sense of place with protagonists trying to find a place in the world despite the hurt they have experienced. Those protagonists are as varied as a young French woman working for the Resistance in World War Two and a hunting guide working today on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
 

     Eric currently lives outside of Chestertown, Maryland, with his wife, a retired lawyer and current artist and gardener.  He has three children, six grandchildren and two dogs, and when not writing, spends as much time as possible outdoors.