silver falls
by shan rao & sophia swettenham
Welcome to Silver Falls, a timeless town in Northern Michigan.
We wanted to create a collaborative set of stories centered around a single place across time. Playing with elements of memory and the ethereal, we imagined a map of this town into which we could interweave the stories of various characters. Through these short pieces, we hope to offer a snapshot of moments from this fictional town over time.
We created the idea of Silver Falls together and, from that, each developed two stories to fit within that space. By creating this shared world of Silver Falls we could begin from a place of togetherness and communion from which we could diverge into our own individual stories. These ultimately work in tandem in this final piece that we’ve created: a visual and narrative map of Silver Falls.
Shan Rao (she/her) is a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center majoring in English with a creative writing concentration. She is the 2020–2021 Managing Editor for The Comma, the current Assistant to the Director of Creative Writing, and a Poetic Justice Institute Fellow. A poet and prose writer, she enjoys exploring the line between fiction and nonfiction. Her work has also appeared in the (un)common sense digital chapbook.
Sophia Swettenham (she/her) is a rising senior Theatre Performance and English double major. She has enjoyed working with Shannie on CommaUnion - it has been a fun way to collaborate in this time of isolation. Selected Acting Credits: The Turn of the Screw, Deilirum, God of Carnage (Fordham Studio); The Winter’s Tale, Cyrano, As You Like It, Prescott Pandemic Tales (St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival); Away (TACTICS); Fair Cruelty, Head Over Heels (Edinburgh Fringe). Sophia had her play, The Roots That Clutch, performed at the University of Toronto’s FOOT Conference, in which she also acted. Upcoming: Virginia/Poe (Fordham Virtual Studio).