That which deranges the senses

Check Out "Thirteen of the Secrets in My Purse" in Uncanny Magazine

2021-05-10T20:23:26Z

One: My lipstick.

The shade is Heart’s Blood.

Morbid, if you ask me.

I wanted to know if it was really the color of heart’s blood so I bought beef heart and tried dabbing my lips.

Close enough.

I emailed to congratulate the lipstick company on their realism. They did not respond.

Read more.

Some purses contain pens, stray receipts, and lip balm. This one’s more exciting. This light-hearted, urban fantasy follows a woman, whose purse is full of secrets with a quest to champion. “Thirteen of the Secrets in My Purse” was published in the May/June issue of Uncanny Magazine.

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The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening

2019-12-19T21:17:00Z

I wrote about my annual narrative pleasures of 2019 at Ambling Along the Aqueduct. The Good Place, Russian Doll, and Bojack Horseman are great – check out what I had to say about them.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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“Your Face” Review at Locus Magazine

2019-12-19T21:15:41Z

Karen Burnham reviews my short story “Your Face” at Locus Magazine. She says “It gets right to the emotional core” of the subject–great to hear! Read more here.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Rachel Swirsky 2019 Award Eligibility Post

2019-12-19T20:56:06Z

Check out my three new short stories from this year!

“Oh! Abigail! Oh. It’s good—it’s so good to see you.

Mom. Hi.

I feel like I could reach out and touch your face. Your face! It’s so good to see your face.”

In “Your Face”, a mother visits an artificial simulation of her dead daughter, trying to figure out how much of her is real. It was published in Clarkesworld Magazine in August, and is available in both audio and text format.

“You are floating. No, not floating—numb. No, not numb—nothing.

You are nothing? No. Wait.”

You don’t know who you are, or what’s going on, but you know for sure you don’t want to be talking to the man onscreen who says he’s your father. I wrote “Compassionate Simulation” with my friend P.H. Lee. It was published in Uncanny Magazine’s July/August issue. (CN: abuse)

“The problem with my dachshund is that he pees.

Constantly. Unrelentingly. On rugs and furniture and laps.

He looks up at you with those large, dark eyes, and attempts to communicate innocence. I know better. He’s a malicious bladder loosener. He knows that he’s a tiny dog in an enormous, chaotic world.”

Global warming has taken its toll on Appalachia: a depressed economy, outbreaks of tropical fevers, and worse. Returning to her declining hometown, a college dropout has only one friend left–her dachshund. Who pees. A lot. “The Problem With My Dachshund” was published in the December 2019 issue of Guernica.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Opportunity to Support a Palestinian Library

2019-12-13T20:14:32Z

I’ve been making microloans through Kiva.org through years, and this project caught my eye. A Palestinian woman is looking to convert an old house into a library and bookshop:

“Duha is a nice girl who lives with her family in a small humble house near Ramallah. Duha has an amazing idea: she decided to restore an old house to make it a library and a place to sell books and other stationery.
She went to Palestine for Credit and Development (FATEN) to request a loan to help her to cover all restoration expenses to convert the old house into a library. Duha hopes that all the students and residents of the area will benefit from the library.“

Check it out at Kiva: https://www.kiva.org/lend/1893559

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Friday, December 13th

2019-12-13T20:10:56Z

Unmoored, I’m a stone

pitching through bottomless dark

from nothing, toward–

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Pete (aka Petrichor)

2019-12-12T20:54:20Z

Pretty sure we’re getting asked for snacks here.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Monday, December 5th

2019-12-09T19:53:07Z

Soon, the cold solstice

will spin us back toward the sun.

Until then, I nest.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Thursday, November 21st

2019-11-21T21:16:57Z

Winter-whitened sun

makes a cold, pretty morning–

gentle, short-lived light.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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“The Book of Dragons” Announcement

2019-11-20T03:03:34Z

Any time I get to write a story with Ann Leckie is a good time. “We Continue” was called “bee dragons” for most of its draft life, so I’m guessing you can infer what it’s about.

Follow this link to find out more!

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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NF Reads Interview

2019-11-18T21:40:58Z

Thanks to NF Reads for hosting me for an interview! I wrote up a bunch of thoughts on things like titling stories, taking criticism and how emotions influence creativity.

Here’s a part of it:

“People. We’re really cool, and complicated, and weird, and unpredictable, and predictable, and everything else. We invented language, after all. I’m just sort of fascinated by the human condition. One of my undergraduate degrees was in Anthropology and it was a deep pleasure to spend hours delving into the ways other humans organize and experience their lives. It’s the same urge that drives me to writing, I think. Ways to learn about people, to understand them, and to communicate. I want to write about our dreams of ourselves and of the future.”

Click through to read the rest!

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Zephyr

2019-11-14T21:10:47Z

Zephyr is posing for his princely portrait.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Thoughts on “Compassionate Simulation”, from PH Lee

2019-11-06T18:23:18Z

Lee and I did have a very intense process while writing this story. There were a lot of craft questions but because the subject matter of this is so intimate and intense — a child’s relationship with abusive and authoritarian parents from whom they’re alienated — that the story is integrally tied into beliefs about family and children and norms and abuse. Lee has a more pessimistic view of some of these things than I do, which sometimes makes me feel like Polyanna, and sometimes feels like just a different background, and which may well be both. I’m also immunized to the artificiality of several literary techniques that are deployed for this subject matter since I’ve been working for so long. Lee did a good job of calling out contrivances, although some remain because literature is still literature. Like Lee, I enjoy how this fell. It was a rewarding collaboration.

You can see the whole thread on Twitter here, and also quoted below.

(paragraphing imposed by Rachel’s evil enter key)

“So here’s a thought about how difficult it is to balance aesthetics, truth, and humanization when writing about abuse. It’s from the experience of writing Compassionate Simulation together with Rachel Swirsky.

Link to the story at Uncanny Magazine. We argued a lot while writing it; nearly over every word. One of the big things we argued about was how bad to make the parenting, and how to express that badness.

The story came out of Rachel wanting to write something based on my game “Island in a Sea of Solitude,” which is part of “Four Ways to Die in the Future.“That core idea drifted over time. Rachel took one of the roads not taken and turned it into her own story, Your Face in Clarkesworld.

But Compassionate Simulation turned into a story about a dysfunctional parent-child relationship. IIRC, I wrote the first pass that included an abuse narrative, and wrote it in a fairly mimetic fashion (drawing directly from the experiences of people I know who’ve cut off their parents). Rachel pointed out that, as written, no one would care about this at all, because Joseph was coming off as a one-dimensional monster. And, although it took me a while to understand, she was right about that.

The truth of it is that in real people, we excuse and dismiss behavior that, in fictional characters, we correctly see as monstrous. A real person necessarily as more complexity than a fictional character, and of course in most real cases we already know the person and have existing social bonds with them. None of that is present in fiction. So while I was writing behavior that I had seen in person described as “complex” or “there are two sides to this story” in fiction it just came across as cartoonishly evil, to the point where readers would immediately disconnect.

Then, in the rewrites, Rachel dialed it back to a single traumatic moment. Which is one of the go-to literary approaches to trauma (and for good reason: it’s good in writing not to unnecessarily multiply the themes or the scenes). But that introduced problems of its own.

There is a problem, in writing, when you portray an abusive man in a sympathetic light, people will sympathize with him entirely, to the point of dismissing and dehumanizing his victims. And the story was beginning to swerve into that narrative: “It was only the one time.” In life, though, it’s never only the one time. It was important to us that the story honestly represent family trauma, and I know of almost no one who has cut off their parents over a single traumatic incident. So having the story revolve around a single incident was viscerally uncomfortable to me. So that was another hurdle for us.

In the end, through a lot of talking and negotiation and planning and reading analysis of estranged parents’ forums on http://issendai.com, we managed to produce the final story.

I’m really proud of the final text. I think we managed to thread the needle of being truthful without overbearing, and of portraying a humanized portrait of a dysfunctional parent without making him the center of the reader’s sympathy. But that’s is a difficult needle to thread. Writing the story gave me an appreciation for exactly how difficult.

Writing something truthful isn’t just about mimesis and it also can’t be straightforward “portray everyone sympathetically.” It needs a conscious balance. Also importantly, in a broad sense, it’s okay to be thinking about fiction explicitly and directly. Writing doesn’t have to entirely be about our first inspiration. Sometimes the right path is to sit down and talk through the goals of the story in an analytical way.

Also importantly, in a broad sense, it’s okay to be thinking about fiction explicitly and directly. Writing doesn’t have to entirely be about our first inspiration. Sometimes the right path is to sit down and talk through the goals of the story in an analytical way.”

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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“Your Face” in Spanish

2019-11-01T20:00:09Z

It is so cool to see my story in other languages! I can’t read most of them, but it’s still really fun to know the story has a life beyond the words I chose. My story “Your Face” has already been translated into Chinese and Spanish — here’s the Spanish version on Cuentos para Algernon, a nonprofit blog and anthology run by Marcheto, who also wrote the translation. https://cuentosparaalgernon.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/tu-cara-de-rachel-swirsky/

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Saturday, November 1st

2019-11-01T19:33:00Z

The cold that nestles,

knits a blanket, lights a fire,

turns you toward yourself.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Monday, October 28th

2019-10-28T19:09:36Z

Cold, like Santa Cruz

in deep winter; Mike and I

walking now as then.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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If You Say So

2019-10-24T19:21:16Z

She’s pretty sure you’re full of shit, though.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku For Saturday, October 19th

2019-10-19T19:17:53Z

The cold rain shivers.

I dart, indoors to indoors,

generous shelters.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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“Where to Find Free Short Stories Online”

2019-10-17T19:16:47Z

Really flattered to see that “Memory of Wind” is one of Sarah Ullery’s favorite stories on Tor.com! I really bled over that one; it ended up intersecting some very personal issues. Sarah Ullery lists a bunch of places to find free short stories online — give it a glance. [link]

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Cloud-Haired Woman

2019-10-07T19:33:25Z

This reminds me of the art my parents had from the sixties, feminist with interesting proportions and bodies. I called it cloud-haired woman after a character in Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore, my favorite of Sheri Tepper’s books which made a strong impression on me as a child. (I haven’t read it since.)

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku For Friday, October 4th

2019-10-05T05:08:29Z

The cold rain shivers.

I dart, indoors to indoors,

generous shelters.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku For Friday, September 27th

2019-09-27T17:39:30Z

God, it is so dark.

My throat closes like the night,

kaleidoscopic.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku for Friday, September 20th

2019-09-20T20:59:07Z

At five, the sky rusts.

My stride matches my husband’s,

a shared metronome.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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A Haiku For Monday, September 16th

2019-09-16T17:37:33Z

The sky is no clock.

My body wants to obey

its demand for sleep.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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Haiku Round-Up #5

2019-09-13T17:33:54Z

Time for another round-up of my recent Haiku! (Here is an explanation of why I’ve been writing and posting haiku.)

A startle of wet

briskly awakens my skin.

I am thinking flesh.

The willow droops black

against a lavender sky,

a still precipice.

Dripping, drooping, weak.

The skin and the rain: both grey.

An unrestful sleep.

In early dimness,

a quiet, unmoving sky

chills, waiting for dusk.

Waiting in the cold,

trying not to let my mind

rush when all is calm.

Returning, the cold

breaks against the bedroom glass.

Wild-eyed, the cats watch.

Afternoon, evening,

merge as the sky stops dancing,

parting from the clock.

Mirrored from Rachel Swirsky.

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