Zero your scales to the burden of a lash, Dear
Justice, but let Tituba clumsy the Magistrates’
minds with a wag of her wizened index. A flight
risk near forests of the Wampanoag where Christians
savaged Queen Weetamoo’s corpse, what else might
Tituba, nonwhite and woman, haunt but a margin
of error? She’s a catbird’s song trapped in the chimney.
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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