For how many years have I kept up the lie, the story
of the middle-aged man in the cap and the gray
or possibly bluish sweatshirt
gaining on me in the night, wrenching
me off the street by my neck, and tossing me
into a ditch, where he had me pinned? I have
paced, I have reflected, I have purposelessly
driven a car to the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau
at the state’s south margin, then circled back
to the central till plain, and it has come to me I must
come clean. It wasn’t
a ditch. It was flat.
My regrets at having repeatedly dismissed the land’s
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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