Often I have knelt beside her as she lay on the white leather sofa,
repeating to herself, Maybe one day I die soon. All my life, I’ve heard this
and watched her continue living. She is here now, with a cleaver,
tenderizing meat. She squats on the kitchen floor and pounds the flesh.
Today she needs my help, points me to the stone mortar.
Heaviness is how she crushes garlic and lemongrass into paste,
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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