More about Rachel...

Rachel was born and raised on a cattle farm in rural Tennessee. From a very early age, she was blessed with an insatiable sense of curiosity. Questions about the way things smelled, tasted, and worked led to electrocution, burnt carpets, and the culinary masterpiece, the Peanut Pimento Cheese Bologna Sandwich.

 

As she grew older, that curiosity also grew. It led to her major in Recording Industry Management rather than something a bit more practical. It led her to take her first solo international trip at 17. It led her all over the United States, and landed her in San Francisco, California. There she discovered that the entire human race is beautiful, and that you should never mouth off to a bus driver. San Francisco was the kind of city that welcomed curiosity and embraced it wholly. But Rachel realized that finding answers to her questions wasn’t enough. A natural storyteller, she yearned to share what she discovered. So she wrote.

 

While in the City by the Bay, she worked as an editor, creating content for textbooks, classroom materials, and educational toys. She also did a bit of freelance music writing (finally putting that degree to use), including writing reviews for DIW Magazine, working on the NoisePop Music Guide, and reviewing shows at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. She even won an honorary mention in the Hipster Haiku contest and had her poetry published in Hot Flashes 2: Sexy Little Stories and Poems. (Don’t tell her mother.)

 

It was during her time in San Francisco that Rachel came down with a horrible case of itchy feet. She fell headlong into the joys of world travel. She journeyed to the belly of France and the islands of Greece. She walked the ancient city of Petra and said hello to the Sphinx. She sipped sangria in Spain. She climbed Mayan pyramids in Guatemala. She traveled to Japan and fell in love with the culture and the people.

 

Japan made such an impression, in fact, that Rachel’s curiosity was piqued once again. What would it be like to live in a foreign country? Would she be able to survive in another culture with no language ability, no friends, and no contacts? She had to find out. So, in August of 2007, Rachel packed up and moved to the Land of the Rising Sun to teach English at Hachijo High School on the island of  Hachijo-jima.

 

While there, Rachel spent her time traveling, writing about traveling, and sharing her love of the English language with some of the best high school students in Japan. Her work appeared in many major Japanese  magazines, including Metropolis, the Kansai Scene, and Japanzine.