My nephew stands at the door. I pretend to be asleep but it’s no use. “Uncle,” he calls and I feel that identity wrenched out of my tired nerves. I open my eyes and look into his sleepy face, puzzled with questions as he stands before me in his red pajamas, “Tell me again. Uncle.” I breathe deeply and ask, “Tell you what?” “Where you came from.” Once again I explain, whispering in the cathedral of his parents’ sleep.
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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