"Fairy Tales For Writers" is a virtually unique entry into the Midwest Book Review's monthly book review column 'The Writing/Publishing Shelf' which is usually devoted to 'how to' books and manuals for aspiring writers and novice publishers. This small, slender, imaginative, hilarious, and all-to-true 30-page collection of poetry by Lawrence Schimel wonderfully and artfully reflects the almost archetypal hopes, ambitions, frustrations, passions, and processes of writing for publication. Here in a kind of poetic folklore format are 'the new writer who encounters a wolf along the path to publication'; the writing workshop member who must always be 'the fairest of them all'; the writer who for the sake of love gives up her own special voice; the shy, anonymous author who slips away before the end of the reading only to be remorselessly tracked down by the editor wanting to publisher her work. Everyone who has ever put pen to paper, and the tried to submit that paper to a publisher, will recognize the poetically expressed truths in Lawrence Schimel's superb little book, "Fairy Tales For Writers". As the last line on the last page of this marvelous little gem has it: "Sometimes there is a happy ending, even in publishing."
