Aristi Trendel

One Solar Year Aristi Trendel

Aristi Trendel was born in Greece. She left her native country when she was nineteen and travelled widely. She lives in France where she is an associate professor of English at Maine University in Le Mans. She has published short stories, poems and literary criticism. You may not give me an appointment, but we'll meet in the dateless night. In the mean time, I am sending you this love-prompted letter steeped in grief, a bunch of blue pages in golden and black, but it's as if I've opened up a vein with a ballpoint pen instead of a razor blade and poured my blood in them, red like the begonia that sprouted from Bee's cheek in my dream, like the rose that sprang from the Greek poet's lips. This is the truth I wanted to bring home to you, a native truth you may tuck away in a remote corner of your foreign heart, my ideal darling and beloved teacher. Anthee, a young woman, mother and wife, shuts herself in a tree house in an Alsatian forest, a mirador, a hunters' post to write a letter to Madame A., her literature professor and specialist of first person narratives. She recounts to the elderly lady her torrid love affair with her MA advisor, Deborah Bellona, Madame A.'s colleague. With her red Biro Anthee investigates the passions of the body and mind.