Once upon a time. A six-year-old boy almost might be raising himself
from the waters of sleep, onto a beach made glass as a wave’s sheet pulls taut.
His left arm props his torso, his legs (still sleeping?) trail behind like a seal’s
footless, tapered shank. Almost: but the gloss this beach holds is the solid flow
of a waxed floor, and the boy’s eyes—open, their own glitter fully wakened—
focus on his right hand about to crown an afternoon’s labor. He holds
a wooden cube and sets the inverted carved V of its base in triumph
on a green cardboard roof: the log cabin has its chimney. He has built well,
linking the dovetailed, pencil-thick pieces of squared cedar, blocking out
the door and windows, even contriving an alcove where his frontiersmen
will hang their coonskin caps and long rifles.
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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