We are at war and I am on a train leaving for the country.
I am troubled because I suspect it might be better to spend the war in the city.
Out the window I see soldiers cooking lunch in kitchen sinks and other unlikely containers.
Their fires burn cheerily and I am jealous of them.
Beside me is a man from my home town.
I think he should recognize me but he gives no sign of it.
I wonder if perhaps I have re-become a child.
When I get tired of this speculation, I pull the emergency cord.
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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