Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Cecilia Wennerström

Here at Bewildering Stories we’re very proud to offer a home to authors writing in English as a second language. Now, would you have guessed on your own that “Hexaflexagon 8191” was originally written in Swedish and translated by the author? As the saying goes, you could have fooled me!

Now, I’ll have to ask Cecilia — as well as Tala Bar, Deep Bora, Ásgrímur Hartmannsson and Norman A. Rubin — to forgive my marveling at an accomplishment that I imagine they take for granted. Except for Canada’s immersion programs in French, North Americans generally learn only the rudiments of a second language, if indeed any at all.

Cecilia modestly claims she is not “a writer.” Let us beg to differ, if only on the basis of her story in this issue. As the professor and student fold and re-fold the hexaflexagon, we notice the subtle interactions between them, and we just know that the laboratory is a little too calm and peaceful. And sure enough, it’s a “Little Red Riding Hood’ story told from the viewpoint of the wolf: beneath the apparent placidity lurks something with big teeth, and it bites!

Cecilia is also a poet, a song composer and the author of a young adult novel. She is also a musician by vocation with a specialty in jazz saxophone. The long and the short of it is that Cecilia is a multi-talented artiste. But I don’t want to give everything away; please enjoy her very personable biographical sketch.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Cecilia. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!