Alright! Time to get that good ol' pinned post in order! I will be keeping this up to date as things change or new stuff comes out.
About me
Madison Rye Progress
Heyyy, I am Maddy, an author living up in Cascadia with a dog, a partner, and some iffy internet. I have an MFA in creative writing and pedagogy at Cornell College, which means I write a shitload — if I am not out of the house, I am probably writing. I have a bunch of books and stories out there you can check out.
I am a nonbinary trans woman, hecka poly, and have a complicated relationship with sex that leads to occasionally identifying as ace.
I am in a complicated place with regards to spirituality, having engaged in the past with Quakerism, neopaganism, and Buddhism. Currently, I am nurturing the overriding interest in Judaism that has been with me for a few decades now.
Skunks&
I kind of...wrote myself into plurality, and it was decided (mostly by others, though I accept it) that my system be named Skunks& (pronounced "skunks-and" or "skunkcetera"). All the names and appearances have been cribbed from Post-Self, and I am not sorry. I am getting better at talking about this over time, but some poor interactions surrounding responses to my plurality in the past have made it a tender subject, and I am only just now giving myself the space to explore.
More info here
Writing
On cohost
I try to keep things tagged so that you can just go digging through to find something. Not always great at it, but here are the tags so far:
- #skunkcetera.writing — Flash fiction, stories, and snippets from larger works
- #skunkcetera.longpost — Longer posts
- #odelets — Poetry
Short work collections
The Sawtooth series
or Sad, Queer Animals in a Flyover State
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I just need out of this town. This stupid fucking town. This brown and flat and sad town. This restless town. This home to ennui and melancholy. This scrub of buildings and people and emotions spilled in the middle of an apathetic landscape like hay from an overturned truck.
Restless Town is a collection of ten furry short stories from the fictional town of Sawtooth, Idaho, exploring the themes of identity, sexuality, and mental health.
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To call what I am feeling a ‘crush’ feels inexact. It is not puppy love. It is not new relationship energy. It is not lust. It is an uncontrollable romantic desire.
It is not grounded in our friendship or my attraction to her. It is more of an obsession. A desperate need for her to feel the same way about me. A craving. A pang. A wildness of the heart that is as frightening as it is pleasant.It is an unmoored, unmooring thing, drawing me ever upwards in lazy, undirected arcs almost — almost — against my will, ever closer to the sun.
Six tales of love. Six tales of need, of desire, of how to live with the ones you cannot live without. Sawtooth may be a nothing town in a flyover state, but those that live there are no less real for it. They bear all the same emotions as anyone else, have all the same needs.
Rum and Coke: Three Short Stories from a Furry Convention
Much ink has been spent following the exploits of our furry characters, but sometimes, the real interest lies in the act of us as humans being furries. Follow the stories of three individuals as they navigate the world of relationships and furry conventions.
- “What I Expected” — As a genderqueer person, how does one go about having a romantic and sexual relationship with a cisgender person? Sascha doesn’t quite know, but it’s time to figure that out.
- “How Many” — Struggling with anxiety, Ian and his boyfriend are flying out to meet Ian’s new second partner, Rei for the very first time.
- “Again” — It’s not uncommon to see one’s ex has changed in interesting ways, but Michael is taken aback when his partner from years past shows up at the convention much different than before.
These three short pieces of erotica explore the unique aspects of romance and sex within the furry fandom, focusing on queer stories and highlighting the complexities of meeting up for the first time, or at least the first time in many years.
Eigengrau
With topics ranging from gender to mental health, flower language to dogs, these five years worth of selected poems by Madison Scott-Clary represent some of her best works, now collected in to one book.
Longer works
Post-Self
Given the chance to live forever in a world not built for death, what do you do?
Given the inability to forget—all your joys and sorrows, all your foundational memories and traumas—how do you cope?
Given the ability to create a full copy of yourself—down to every single one of those memories—to do as they will, to individuate and live out their own forever lives, or merge back down and meld their memories with your own, what paths do you take?
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“All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”
With immersive technology at its peak, it’s all too easy to get lost. When RJ loses emself in that virtual world, not only must ey find eir way out, but find all the answers ey can along the way.
And, nearly a century on, society still struggles with the ramifications of those answers.
2020 Leo Award winner
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“I am saying that you trust me — really trust me — and that life in the System is more subtle than I think you know. You let me into your dreams, my dear, and your dreams influence this place as much as, if not more than, your waking mind.”
No longer bound to the physical, what lengths should one go to in a virtual world to ensure the continuity of one’s existence?
Secession. Launch. Two separations from two societies, two hundred years apart. And through it all, so many parallels run on so many levels that it can be dizzying just keeping up. The more Ioan and Codrin Bălan learn, the more it calls into question the motivations of even those they hold most dear.
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“Do you know how old I am, Dr. Brahe? I am 222 years old, a fork of an individual who is…who would be 259 years old. I am no longer the True Name of 2124. Even remembering her feels like remembering an old friend…"
The cracks are showing.
Someone picked up on the broadcast from the Dreamer Module and as the powers that be rush to organize a meeting between races, Dr. Tycho Brahe is caught up in a whirlwind of activity. And as always, when the drama goes down, there is Codrin Bălan to witness it.
When faced with eternity in a new kind of digital world, however, old traumas come to roost, and those who were once powerful are brought to their knees
Growth is colliding with memory, and the cracks are showing.
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“To be built to love is to be built to dissolve. It is to be built to unbecome. It is to have the sole purpose of falling apart all in the name of someone else."
Even the grandest of stories can feel small and immediate when it’s just one person’s life.
One of the most well-known names from one of the most well-known clades on the System, the avatar of political machinations and cool confidence, has been brought low. With help coming only from Ioan Bălan and the most grudging of support from her cocladists, all True Name has left to save herself is the ability to change.
ally
We don't experience memory in linear fashion, nor even in a strictly coherent one. It's peppered with tangents and strange loops. It's multithreaded. It's not always made up of words. Why should a memoir strive to strip memory completely of this context?
ally is an ergodic, arborescent, semiautobiographical work about identity, mental health, spirituality, and the mutability of the past. A lot of the information contained within is real, some of it isn’t. Each page is structured as a conversation between myself and my ally, a mirror reflection of myself.
Based off the interactive project at ally.id, this book explores different facets of my life — some true, some embellished, some wholly fictitious — in a non-linear, ergodic fashion, using color, page-layout, and mixed-media to create a book more experience than memoir.
Book page | Buy ebook | Buy paperback | Buy making-of ebook ally From Start to Finish
Anthologies
I've also edited or helped edit a few anthologies, all of which contain a story of my own.
Arcana — A Tarot Anthology
“The first card is your past,” the vixen said, turning over a tattered card. She spoke as she traced the stroke of lightning along the top. “The tower. Difficult times, sudden change. An upheaval in your life? A new revelation?” The darkness of the room stifled your voice; you could only nod. “The hanged man,” she murmured as she turned over the second card. “Being true to yourself, A resolution of difficulties. This is your present, the work you have to do right now.” “The third card,” a smile traced her features, “is your future…”
Included in this anthology are twenty-two works of furry fiction by authors within the fandom, including Kyell Gold, Mary E. Lowd, Chris Williams, and many others. Come with us and divine the meaning of all things from within Arcana.
Contains my story "The Fool" (titled "The First Step")
When the World Was Young
The invention of writing postdates, invariably, the invention of storytelling. After all, what purpose is there to writing, until you have something to write down?
Excavate these writings, then. Decipher them carefully. Let them, at last, convince you to forget writing until instead they sit across the fire, speaking to you oral traditions, folktales, and of days long, long past When the World Was Young.
Contains my story "Unseeing"
Clade
Clade (n) – /kleɪ̯d/ – post-self theory
A group of individuals patterned off a single root consciousness, formed through branching expansion of the forking of its constituent members.
See also: cladistics, cocladist, up-/down-/cross-tree instance, forking, post-self theory.
— The System Central Library Encyclopedia
To split oneself among however many individuals, to let the mind drift and diverge, to feel the world from points of view not your own, and then let those memories crash down into you…well, it inspires a feeling best described as ‘heady’, to say the least.
Book page | Buy ebook | Buy paperback
Contains my story "Après un rêve"