All night I dreamed of ornate fountains,
water sprayed in intricate designs
like liquid lace or the traceries of Gothic
windows turned translucent, silver
under a full moon. And I watched the water
travelling toward this art—down
from clouds, up through capillary
grasses from the oceans, dipped from wells
by women whose scarves waved like kelp
in dyeing vats where water briefly
married earth’s colors to the cloth
and then sluiced on. And I thought
how water’s clarity was born:
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play