Sheet-monger, blanket-hoarder,
wool gatherer of nightmares,
wrapped in white linen like a corpse,
wrapped in your dreams, a straight-jacket,
I remember that night in Frisco
when we got our new bodies.
It wasn’t an operation
performed by a team of specialists;
it wasn’t a heart transplant;
nothing was sewn or grafted.
In our new bodies it was a miracle.
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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