I’d had a “good night’s sleep,” meaning
thinking of waking, and waking,
shifting closer together, and then not.
That and the music we’re getting, sometimes
timely, sometimes incomplete, like Ulysses and Penelope
talking it over in a back room, not
so much concerned if people hear, after
all it’s their problem isn’t it? Or
I was racing along the moon, the water’s edge
seemed about right, but how was I to know
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play