As Lorna falls across Freddy, and Bernadette,
who grew up in a rainy village of one factory
in upper New York, a schoolgirl toed and twisted
into a witty and bold motor called a ballerina,
lifts her leg comely—Sonia, red bandana
holding down her raven oceanic hair, once
on her toes in the Johannesburg Ballet Company,
floats with elegant arch. Sonia’s fingers point down
like swans piercing the lake with hungry eyes.
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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