Rachel Carpenter

My reasons for writing have changed since 1995. I am still preoccupied with memory, childhood, and family. But while before I wrote out of a love of putting words together and a desire to exorcise certain demons, I now write more cut of a love of putting words together and a desire to reach people.

Dividing my time between Philadelphia and Prague for the last few years, I have become aware of just how strong my links to Philadelphia are. I have begun writing fiction and nonfiction that draws on my experience of growing up in Center City, and I look forward to moving back home for good.

Rachel Carpenter's stories have appeared in One Story, Mcsweeney's, and Ploughshares, among other publications.
 

Other houses on our street held families that made my own look bland, dull and boring, as well as redundant. There was a stone house on the corner, unnaturally sooty from the fire set by the youngest son years before, at a time when he could not decide what to do with his life; his life after that was spend in and out of halfway houses. I remember him, a long-haired boy who sat on his steps, drinking a soda and gazing at you. He had worried the neighbors long before his dramatic action proved their fears grounded. His mother was a soft, gentle woman who baked her own cookies for Halloween, every year; it was impossible to either refuse her cookies or eat them once you were safely home. Is she a good witch or a bad witch? you wondered well into every November, wondering also if you were as crazy as her son for thinking such things.

- from My Wild High School Days, 1996-97