Rachel Cantor

My experience growing up in Rome and living, working, and traveling around the world leads me to write about exiles, refugees, and expatriates - women, usually, who find themselves far from home - in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America - and radically disoriented. A Pakistani economist; Romanian poets; Tutsi aid workers; a polyglot busload of travelers crossing Central Asia - all injured by the convulsions of history - the Mexican Revolution, the 1960s, Pakistani coups, genocide in Rwanda, the Holocaust.

In their disorientation and desire to do better, my characters consider "ultimate" questions, not as abstractions but as questions vital to their lives - what does it mean to forgive, how do we love, how do we construct meaning, what is the purpose of art, what is a well-lived life? Some try to escape this questioning but eventually find themselves alone and forced to confront their spiritual yearnings and deficits. A burned-out refugee worker, for example, takes a break, after years of immersion in the devastations of history, to examine the depth of her cynicism and to ask, why, and, what next? My characters are usually secular, unable to rely on, or even to refer to, religiously defined certainties; like many of us, they are spiritual orphans.

My stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, DoubleTake, The New England Review, Chelsea, The Antioch Review, Gargoyle, and The Greensboro Review. The Paris Review story was short-listed for an O'Henry Award; another story was chosen by Steve Dixon to represent the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in the Scribner's national Best of the Fiction Workshops competition. I have been a fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, VCCA, Ragdale, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and the Vermont Studio Center. I am completing a collection and revising a first novel. I grew up in Italy, have lived and worked in Australia, France, India, and Pakistan, and have traveled to more than 30 countries. A professional writer/editor for nearly 20 years, mostly for nonprofits that work in developing countries, I have also completed short-term writing assignments in Azerbaijan, Kenya, Mexico, Rwanda, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.
 

The narrator and Esther have in fact not spoken about the future. Like all literary lovers, they live in an eternal omnipresent, resenting the intrusion of the future. Their courtship is written in the present tense. In a poem called "Au(to)bade," they curse the arrival not of the dawn but the child's school bus. So it is a shock - to them, and to us - when they return to Esther's apartment one unseasonably warm March day, having spent the morning making love at Romei's apartment, the afternoon picnicking on the Janiculum, to find the apartment cleaned out, the husband not in Parma as promised, the child not in school, both gone, their clothes and effects gone, the jewelry given Esther by her husband, gone, her passport, gone. The only things that remained, besides Esther's clothes: her untouched translation, a cancelled bankbook, a note, a manila envelope.

Inside the envelope, photographs of the happy couple, including some quite obscene, dating back to the fall, a letter from a mutual friend, a New York lawyer, assuring Esther that she'd forfeited her maternal rights, also her rights to spousal support, begging her for the sake of all concerned not to press the issue - not that she has money to return to the U.S., much less hire an attorney: her husband has left her absolutely penniless.

You have what you want, the note says. Now you get to live with it. Enjoy.

The note, reminiscent of Dante's moral economy (punishment horribly fitting the crime), suggests that the lovers are now in Hell. Be careful what you wish for: you might just get it. And with this, the piece shifts from the present to the past tense. Esther and Romei are plunged into time, out of their lyric self-absorption into something more dynamic. The plot thickens.

- from an untitled novel in progress

Support for residencies at artist colonies to complete a first story collection.