Breathe these words in all languages before they’re lost, thank you and mean it. The things we take for granted and now have abandoned us. Or will. Water, air, rich earth beneath the rubble, thank you for our daily breath. Give us this day. Exhale the little thank you words, they’re quick, slip out our pores, clean hair. A shower. Soap and aspirin. Thank you. Whoever “you” might be. Appreciation. A survival skill we never get to hone enough. Thank you. For life. For health, for the newborn baby slipping out between the hips. For wondrous eyes and little rosebud fists, thank you, sweet pea.
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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