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Rachel Simon is the author of a novel, The Magic Touch, a collection of stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, and an inspirational book for writers, The Writer's Survival Guide. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College.

For more about Rachel personally, read on.
For more about Rachel's writing history -- and for insights on how you can become a writer -- click here.

Rachel Simon was born in 1959 in Newark New Jersey, the second of four children. Her family moved around New Jersey and Pennsylvania several times when she was a child, and Rachel, who was always a very social, creative person, wrote mountains of letters to keep up with all her distant friends. She also wrote short stories, novels, and plays, which she enjoyed sharing with others. The four children, who include the now-famous Beth, spent a great deal of time listening to pop music on the radio, and all these years later can still sing every note of every Beatles song ever recorded. (Beth can manage Donny Osmond and The Partridge Family, too.)

Rachel’s parents divorced when she was eight, and for the next eight years all four children lived with their mother. Then, due to circumstances that are chronicled in Rachel’s book Riding The Bus With My Sister, the children moved in with their father, and Rachel entered Solebury School, a very special boarding school in New Hope, Pennsylvania. To this day, she credits Solebury with giving her the first true education she ever received, as well as the respect that too few adolescents seem to find in school. She graduated from Solebury in 1977 and then went on to Bryn Mawr College.

Always a hard worker, in college Rachel discovered the secrets of discipline and time management. She was also captivated by her courses in Anthropology, and enjoyed the company of a large circle of friends with whom she remains close decades later. Unfortunately, she fell into a writer’s block when it came to her creative work. She graduated in 1981 and moved into Philadelphia.

She spent the next five years at a variety of jobs, including paralegal (at which she was terrible), administrative assistant (at which she was even worse), and research supervisor for a television study (there, she was reasonbly competent). She met the man who is called Sam in Riding The Bus With My Sister, and they moved in together. Shortly afterwards, she regained her ability to produce creative work, and at twenty-six she entered a graduate program in creative writing.

In the next several years, as she wrote the story collection Little Nightmares, Little Dreams and the novel The Magic Touch, she and Sam lived on his architect’s salary and what she earned through her writing. From their house in Abington, Pennsylvania, she began teaching private classes in creative writing. Occasionally she also picked up money as a temporary secretary and artist’s model. In 1995, she and Sam split up, and Rachel took a job running events at the Barnes & Noble in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually moving to that area.

Around that time, Rachel also began writing commentary for The Philadelphia Inquirer and teaching at Bryn Mawr College, in addition to continuing with her private classes. In 1997 she published The Writer’s Survival Guide and then worked on some long pieces of fiction. When people asked how she managed to do so much, she would tell them that she just didn’t sleep. This was not much of an exaggeration.

As readers of Riding The Bus With My Sister know, Rachel’s life changed when she wrote an article about her sister Beth’s unusual lifestyle of riding the buses in the city where she lives. Over the course of riding with Beth for the next year, Rachel came to leave most of her jobs behind, found her way back to her sister, and rediscovered her friendships. She also finally moved outside New Jersey and Pennsylvania, ending up in a nearby state.

And as for Sam? He is part of the story too, but fans of Riding The Bus With My Sister would not want us to reveal it.

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