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Rachel Swirsky
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Excerpt
A thousand flickering seasons ago, Spin's people learned to walk on air and went to live in the clouds. They replaced their skins with silver to capture and reflect the sun.
Stiff metal tongues stifled speech, so the people had to learn new ways to communicate. Their thoughts crystallized in their mouths and cascaded forth as pearls, shoestrings, music boxes. Spoken objects hid their meanings behind a hundred branching associations, impossible to decipher. Puzzled friends, parents, and lovers gathered them in their palms. Sharptail snake, do you carry tidings of venom or wriggling glee? Tell me, compass, have you lost a direction or found one?
- Excerpt from "Speech Strata" (unpublished)
Bio
Rachel Swirsky is a graduate of Clarion West 2005 and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop from which she received her MFA in fiction. Her fiction has appeared in markets including Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, and Rich Horton's Year's Best Fantasy 2007.
Rachel is also the editor of the world's first audio fantasy magazine, PodCastle, which broadcasts reprints of great fantasy stories each Tuesday.
Publications
"Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind," Subterranean Online
"Scene from a Dystopia," Subterranean Magazine
"Heartstrung," Pseudopod, originally printed in Interzone
"Mirror Images," Fantasy Magazine
Writing Description
Rachel writes on the literary end of the speculative fiction genre. She enjoys playing with political controversy and marginalized points of view.
Goals
This year, I'd like to keep my participation in the Write-a-thon simple. I want to write a significant amount each week. This amount can take the form of: a new short story, a revised short story, a short story polished well enough to be sent out for the first time, or at least 20 pages on a longer project. I'm particularly excited about this year's Write-a-thon because of one my students from the University of Iowa is attending Clarion West, and it will be fun to parallel her experience in some small way.
I'll post about it on my blog and discuss it with family members. Either the wedding will make them feel generous or the wedding will make them feel like they spent enough on that serving bowl, damn it. ;-)
Website
My website is http://www.rachelswirsky.com. My blog is http://velourmane.livejournal.com. My magazine is http://podcastle.org.
