This was the first piece of writing I was ever paid for, and as such, I felt it deserved pride of place at the beginning of this book.
I wrote it in the spring of my senior year of college, as part of a push that netted me seven stories in the space of two months. Why did I churn out so many? Because there was an award which at the time was called the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing (it’s now the Dell Magazines Award for same), and I was eligible to enter it that year with anything I wrote before graduation. My effort didn’t go unrewarded: while most of the pieces I submitted got nowhere, “Calling Into Silence” won the Grand Prize, earning me five hundred dollars and a trip to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Quite apart from its place in the history of my career, this story is emblematic of my writing in general in one key respect. I got the idea for it in one of my folklore classes, while listening to a professor who had done a great deal of work with spirit possession practices in West Africa. I always tell people I didn’t choose my majors (anthropology and folklore) by asking myself what would be useful to me as a fantasy writer . . . but that’s more or less the effect it had.
“Calling Into Silence” was posted on the website for Asimov’s Magazine as part of the award, in the spring of 2003.