Bio & Readings

Eliot Schain was born in Limestone, Maine in the fifties and has lived in the East, the West, and the South in an effort to understand this country, and in the process find paradise.  He thinks he’s found it finally: a house in Berkeley and a job teaching in Martinez, the home of John Muir, which (unlike Berkeley) is still America.

Schain’s first “career” was in restaurants and bars, and he thus got to know communities in Woodstock, Illinois; New York City, Hoboken, Oakland, and San Francisco.  Bartending at the Beat ‘N Path Café in Hoboken was the best, and he held court for struggling painters and writers… as well as the electricians and plumbers who were helping gentrify northern New Jersey in the early eighties.  There were a great many dancers in Hoboken at the time.  One of them, Mary D’Elia, became his wife.

His second “career” was teaching, which he still does at a high school at the base of California’s coastal hills — just half a mile down from John Muir’s old Victorian homestead.  This is where Muir lived the second half of his life and wrote the manifestos and essays that helped preserve much of our nation’s wilderness.  The spirit of Muir still lingers in Martinez  belligerently, as it stands nose to nose with the five refineries along the Carquinez Strait, the body of water that sluices most of California’s inland rain through a break in the hills to the sea.

Schain has built an American Studies program in Martinez, which integrates American literature and history, and through the program he tries to give students an understanding of their nation’s past, as well as our collective metaphors.  The resulting awareness can further growth of the “self,” and lead to responsible citizenship, for at the root of the program is the idea of a dialectical—and useful—tension between great forces in the world.  To Schain’s way of thinking, understanding this concept is a key to moving beyond our sometimes myopic, self-important, and brutal nationalism.

Another one of his jobs is parenting, and he and his wife have two teenagers they are both immensely proud of, and who give him great hope for the future.

Recently, Schain has added a psychotherapy practice, while working towards an MFT license. The experience has been rewarding both as a vehicle for helping others--as well as deepening his understanding of the complexity of human experience.