News Release...

June 6, 2007

Sturbridge, MA –Sturbridge-based author Rita Schiano’s recent novel, Painting The Invisible Man, is ripped from thirty-year-old headlines. Identified as a contemporary historical fiction, the story eerily reflects the 1976 unsolved murder of the author’s father. 
    Set in Providence, Rhode Island, the story is told first person through the main character, Anna Matteo. “While researching the online archives of The Providence Journal,” explained Schiano, “Anna makes a keying error that leads her to a path she’d been avoiding most of her life; on a journey inside the world of her father, Paulie Matteo, killed gangland-style more than two decades before. The way it begins for Anna is how it began for me. A simple keying error.”
    In 2001, Schiano was researching the archives of the Syracuse Post-Standard for a client. She accidentally charged ten articles instead of the one she needed to her credit card. After retrieving her client’s news article, Schiano, a native of Syracuse, New York, began typing in names of people she knew. “Why I typed my father’s name, I’ll never know.”
    Thirty-seven articles from the 1990s came up that referenced her father. “It wouldn’t have been all that strange had my father not died in 1976.” The headline that caught her attention mentioned FBI tapes where the man under surveillance “bragged” about getting away with murder.  The man on the tape had been acquitted in 1979 of the murder of Schiano’s father.
    “At that moment I knew I had to explore this story,” Schiano said. And it seems that the moment she made up her mind, a series of events kept pushing Schiano in that direction. “In the novel Anna quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. Every time I backed away from writing this story, something would push me forward.”
    For Schiano, the writing of the book was tremendously cathartic. “I had to confront truths about my father I had chosen to ignore for most of my life. Anna’s self-exploration was intensely personal.”  Despite the personal element of the story, Schiano believes the lesson is universal. “Anna’s life experience, in and of itself, is unique to her. Yet the exploration one’s personal history is what reader will relate to. Everyone has a story; everyone has a history.” 
    Fans of The Soprano’s and this genre of book will find Painting The Invisible Man intriguing. Schiano offers an inside look at what it’s like to grow up in a different kind of family. “Most of us aren’t like Meadow Soprano or grow up like the Gotti’s.”
Schiano’s first novel, Sweet Bitter Love, was published in 1997. Since then, she has contributed several short stories to journals and anthologies and has teamed with Paul Gemme of Auburn to develop a one-hour television drama, T.I.M.E. Share, Inc., that is currently making the L.A. rounds.
    Schiano’s words are not restricted to page and screen. In 2001, Maggie Moran, CEO of KidsTerrain, Inc. commissioned her and New York songwriter Jamie Notarthomas to write a song for children that addressed the horrific events of September 11th. Their song, Tiny Acts of Kindness, has played on children’s radio programs throughout the country. A second song commission for KidsTerrain, The Magic In Me, was featured on the NPR Radio children’s show The Zucchini Brothers.
    Schiano is also known throughout Central Massachusetts’ communities for more than just her writing. From 1989 – 2000 she co-owned The Casual Café, and Italian-Japanese restaurant in Sturbridge.
    Painting the Invisible Man by Rita Schiano is now available via The Reed Edwards Company, the book publisher’s web site, www.reededwards.com. Price: $14.95. Copies are also on sale at Garieri Jewelers, 139 Main Street (Bedrock Plaza) in Sturbridge.
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