One of the great pleasures of hosting The Miami Book Hub podcast is discovering the stories behind the storytellers, especially when the storyteller is someone I have known and admired for years.
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My guest for Episode 14, Timothy Schmand, is a longtime South Florida public servant, former executive director of the Bayfront Park Management Trust, and, as I only recently learned, an accomplished, award-winning author. Tim and I once worked together in downtown Miami, but somehow, through all those years, I never knew about the extraordinary literary life he had been quietly building alongside his civic career.
Tim’s path to writing began in high school, when a girlfriend sat down to complete a story assignment. Watching her put words on paper sparked something in him.
“From that point on,” he recalled, “I started thinking of myself as a writer and tried to live a life that a writer would live.”
And live it he did.
Inspired by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac, Tim built a cabin in the woods, hitchhiked across North America, traveled from Buffalo to Key West and later worked on a wagon train program for juvenile offenders. Eventually, a cold Buffalo November helped steer him permanently toward South Florida. After discovering Coconut Grove, and its famously bohemian spirit, he joined a writers’ group at the Coconut Grove Library and later began leading it.
His professional journey was nearly as unexpected. A job as a weekend security guard at Miami’s history museum led to an opportunity as a grant writer, even though he had never written a grant. He proved good at it, rose through the organization and eventually brought those skills to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, the Miami Science Museum and Bayfront Park. Following Hurricane Andrew and a period of institutional upheaval, Tim ultimately found himself leading the park’s management trust.
Throughout it all, he kept writing.
His books include The Danbury Chronicles, a rust belt magic realism tale of a snowy Thanksgiving weekend; Just Johnson: The London Delivery, a distinctly Miami story involving a delivery man, organized crime and Cold War intrigue; and The True Tales of Bad Benny Taggart, inspired partly by Tim’s experiences working with troubled young people.
Tim also shared practical wisdom for other writers. Each morning, he writes three pages in a journal, practices yoga, returns with more coffee and then gets to work. His reason for writing every day is beautifully simple: Ideas, like wet paint, remain fluid when we keep working with them, and you have to continue working them before the ideas get baked in.
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His advice about publishing was equally candid: “If you’re writing to get rich, get another job,” he said.
Writers should instead find the places where they hope to see their work and submit it. Success may require capturing “lightning in a bottle,” but the deeper reward comes from transforming an idea into a finished work.
“It’s really painful to write,” Tim admitted. “It’s really annoying to write.” Yet seeing what he created from nothing, he said, “brings me great joy.”
That tension—the difficulty of the work and the thrill of having done it—will resonate with every writer. It certainly did with me.
You can find Tim’s books for purchase on Amazon, and learn more about him and his works at TimothySchmand.com.
Watch Episode 14 of The Miami Book Hub at YouTube.com/@J.AdrianBetancourt or listen on Spotify, and please like, subscribe and share the program. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing and stay curious, Miami!
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