Site Introduction

Welcome to Swan Tower, a joint website for my academic (Bryn Neuenschwander) and fiction (Marie Brennan) endeavours. Why a joint website? Well, I'm both studying and writing fantasy, so keeping them totally separate seemed pointless. On the other hand, people coming here for information about me as an academic may not want to wade through information on my stories, and vice versa, hence the site being divided into two halves. It's not a clean division, of course, so I recommend browsing the whole site, if you're interested.

This central location contains information for the whole site; you can get to most of the specific pages from the site map. And now, onto a Frequently Asked Question . . . .

Why "Swan Tower"?

It's a long story. It begins with my legal last name, Neuenschwander; it's Swiss German, and translates to something like "new clearing" (or maybe "person who makes a new clearing"?) -- neuen (new) + schwand (clearing). People who have studied German, though, often don't realize Swiss German's somewhat different, and parse the name into "new swan" instead -- neue (new) + schwan (swan). I was considering calling this website New Swan until I realized that URL was taken, so it morphed into Swan Tower. I preferred something nonspecific like that to a URL based on either of the names I use, since a) that would imply the site was for one or the other, and b) my legal name would make a horrible address. And I've picked up some swan connections in the last couple of years, so it's appropriate in its own way.