You think me evil? I think so of you.
Before you captured me I was the queen
of Goths, and there I was no lady, but
a woman. None would dare to make me beg
for my son's life, but then they knew enough
to fear a mother's wrath.
So what, you ask,
of sweet Lavinia? Her mother's dead
and you're a heartless wretch. Did her spilled blood
make you weep in wonder? Ha! Now you know
what this barbaric heart felt. Yes, she begged
for mercy, just as I had, and I thought
a moment on her fate, but then she cried
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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