NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE - Lincoln Center Theater

NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE WINTER 2019 ISSUE NO. 73

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2019, Issue Number 73 Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Executive Editor Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editor Strick&Williams, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Eric Kuhn Allison M. Blinken Betsy Kenny Lack James-Keith Brown Memrie M. Lewis H. Rodgin Cohen Ninah Lynne Ida Cole Phyllis Mailman Judy Gordon Cox Ellen R. Marram Ide Dangoor John Morning David DiDomenico Brooke Garber Neidich Shari Eberts Elyse Newhouse Curtland E. Fields Rusty O'Kelley Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Andrew J. Peck Cathy Barancik Graham Robert Pohly David J. Greenwald Richard Ruben J. Tomilson Hill, Stephanie Shuman Chairman Emeritus David F. Solomon Judith Hiltz Tracey Travis Linda LeRoy Janklow, Mila Atmos Tuttle Chairman Emeritus David Warren Raymond Joabar Kaily Smith Westbrook Mike Kriak Kenneth L. Wyse Caryn Zucker John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Augustus K. Oliver, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation— Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Issue 73

My Caveman Life ANTHONY DOERR 4

You

JOYCE CAROL OATES 6

The Yellow Wood BILLY COLLINS 11

What Is a Nantucket Sleigh Ride?

12

What If

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH 14

A Curious Dream LEWIS CARROLL 16

Alternate Ambitions RENÉE FLEMING 18

Levitation LEAH YERPE 19

Borges and I

JORGE LUIS BORGES 19

Another Way 20

Persona

JOHN STEZAKER 22

Support for this edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is provided by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.

To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover: © Francisco Vargas. @franciscomoxi Right: Portrait of John Guare by Howard Schatz from Above & Beyond Opposite page: Wind rose pattern © Ievgen Radchenko / Alamy Stock Vector © 2019 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

John Guare interviewing John Guare.

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR One of the great privileges of editing this magazine is working alongside the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s executive editor, John Guare, and his armory of genius. John is a rapacious reader, and with his elephantine cache of knowledge he’s able to bridge ideas, people, and fields of study. He also has a gift for community, for bringing an infinite variety of people together. These gifts are evident in every issue of our magazine.

In his new play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride (a phrase used by whalers to describe what happens just after a whale is harpooned), John’s exuberant language, irreverent humor, and very particular way of inviting an audience to question the world guide us through the excavation of memory, the muddy, messy search for inspiration, our relationship to our desires, and our fantasies about what could have been if our lives had taken a different turn.

John forbid us to do an issue about him or his new play. However, there is a limit to his powers.

In an act of defiance, we channeled John’s flair for bringing together fascinating people and ideas, and the result is one of my favorite editions of the magazine. We invited a roster of luminaries—Billy Collins, Anthony Doerr, Renée Fleming, Joyce Carol Oates, Anna Deavere Smith, and the play’s cast, designers, and director, Jerry Zaks—to riff off the theme of alternate lives. The result is a delightfilled issue with caveman fantasies, the fictional life of a bookstore owner, poetry about the diverging of life’s roads and the innumerable choices a person

makes—whether to go off to sing with a jazz trio or to become a psychiatrist or a professional blood donor. The issue also features an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the quintessential alternate-reality tale, and a passage

by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer revered for his metaphysical fiction, who also appears as a character in John’s play.

The art in this edition revels in the bending of reality and the transformation of expectations. Our cover art, by Francisco Vargas, eerily blends two opposing worlds. The drawings of Leah Yerpe wend their way through the entire issue—the meticulously depicted human figures twisting the line between the real and the imagined. The portfolio of John Stezaker’s collages examines the boundary between what is and what could be. Like the art, John Guare’s Nantucket Sleigh Ride is magical, humorous, and searching—at once an enormous fish tale and a provocative look at the surprising turns that define our lives.

Happy reading,

Alexis Gargagliano

A Special Note from André Bishop, Producing Artistic Director, Lincoln Center Theater John Guare is as responsible as anyone for the happy reopening of the Vivian Beaumont Theater (now known as Lincoln Center Theater) in 1986. A superb revival of The House of Blue Leaves, followed by his glorious Six Degrees of Separation—both directed

by Jerry Zaks—did so much to ensure that theater on the Lincoln Center campus could survive and flourish after years of failure and confusion.

We have gone on to produce a number of his other plays, and I think most people, when they think about Lincoln Center Theater, immediately think of John and his extraordinary body of work.

John has made himself part of the fabric of this company, beloved by staff and Board, and proud champion of our work during the good times and the bad. We rejoice in his friendship and bow down before his immense love of the theater and his extraordinary artistic contributions to us and to the entire American theater.

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My Caveman Life Anthony Doerr ALTHOUGH I’M ALLERGIC TO OUR DOG, can’t fix the garbage disposal, possess zero insight into the musical tastes of my teenage sons, get weird pains in my right knee, miss having hair on my head, and wish I owned a goat, I don’t believe that, if presented with the choice, I’d actually trade my life for another.

If I switched lives, would I have to switch spouses, too? No thanks. My wife wakes up happy every day, doesn’t make fun of me for watching reruns of Fixer Upper, and regularly stops what she’s doing to listen to me complain about how “difficult” it is to sit in a warm room all day writing a novel.

And our kids? They’re hilarious. The other day Owen said, “Dad, you’re not bald, you’re just taller than your hair.”

So I’d like to keep my family, please. May I keep my eyesight, too? Because—ahem, brace yourself— I’m forty-five years old and still have twenty-twenty vision. I can read the nanoscopic print in my Signet Classic paperback of 1984 without squinting. I can read a dessert menu by candlelight.

But no life is perfect, it’s true, and if you’re handing out a free ride on the Alternative Life Machine, I will admit that sometimes I stop at an airport window and peer past the jetways and the de-icing trucks to the trees beyond the fences and think, I’d rather be out there. And sometimes I step out of my office to run an errand and every cell in my body starts murmuring, Ooh, we like this, stay out here, pitch your phone under the wheels of that bus and find a patch of grass to lie down in. And I just read the World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Planet

Image © Leah Yerpe, Lepus, 2012, graphite and ink on paper, 50" x 18."

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ANTHONY DOERR

a story. Lots of cigarettes got smoked. But mostly Report, which says that between 1970 and 2014 there was silence. They just waited, with superworld wildlife populations have shown an overall human patience, to see if the world would bless decline of sixty percent; and lately, even here in the them by intersecting their lives with a narwhal’s. hills of southwest Idaho, I feel as if I’m seeing fewer I have a friend who fly-fishes for steelhead foxes on the trails, fewer magpies in the sagebrush, trout every fall, and if he’s lucky enough to catch fewer frogs in the ponds, fewer trout in the rivers. one, he told me once, tears in his eyes, before So if I do get one ride on the Alternative Life releasing that fish he wants to kiss it, in appreciation Machine, as long as I can press a blue button whenof the hundreds of miles it has traveled, of how ever I want and summon a magic helicopter to evacincredible its journey has been. uate me back into my current life, and as long as I can bring my wife, my children, and my eyeballs with me, then okay, I’ll climb aboard and set the dial not so much for a different who as for a different when.

“The mouse in the corner, the elk in the forest, I’d like to live in a time when the world contained the beetle in the soup, the doe in the road, a lot fewer people and a lot more wild animals. the mosquito at your ear—every time your life I’d like to be a caveman. intersects with the life of a wild animal, you I know, I know, cavepeople didn’t have penicillin, are reminded that the world is a shared place. ” Gore-Tex, or audiobooks, but they also didn’t have to remember Wi-Fi passwords or feel pressure to send out annual Christmas cards. Cavekids didn’t have to sit at desks every weekday preparing for The mouse in the corner, the elk in the forest, multiple-choice tests; instead, Grandpa led them the beetle in the soup, the doe in the road, the over hills and through rivers, teaching them which mosquito at your ear—every time your life intersects flower poisoned Aunt Thag and which weed soothed with the life of a wild animal, you are reminded Uncle Zog’s pain and how to tell if a short-faced that the world is a shared place. bear was about to kill them.

Those reminders used to come every hour. Now In our caveperson lives, my sons could learn the we’re lucky if they come once a week. sounds made by real creatures instead of Fortnite In my caveman life, maybe we’d make it long creatures, and they probably wouldn’t leave their enough to memorize a few songs, songs that told socks lying all over the place, because they’d have the stories of the animals around us, songs that to make their socks. Also, we’d all appreciate a helped us remember—not in our heads but in our great meal so much more, because there wouldn’t bones—that we humans are not elevated above be any great meals. other species, not separate from the living world but Probably this is a naïve white-boy fantasy. intrinsic to it. And even if we failed, if we summoned Probably you’re thinking: I give that guy three hours the magic helicopter too early, if we blinked and in 18,000 B.C.E. slurping from puddles and trying found ourselves back in our present, when doctors to stitch together a blanket from dandelions before peer inside bodies and thermostats make winter he’s begging for the magic helicopter. feel like summer and smartphone apps deliver spicy But what if we made it one whole day? What beef to our doorstep, maybe we would still tell if we made it three days? Or ten? Would that be stories about our time as cavepeople, and maybe, long enough for a few ancient memories to flow for as long as each story lasted, we’d remember back into our bodies? Would that be long enough what it was like to pay full attention to the living for us to remember that every calorie we manage creatures around us, when we scrutinized the to eat is a gift, that every loaf of bread is a miracle, passages of the birds and trembled at the howling of that every crackle in the brambles, every cluster the carnivores and wondered at the twinkling of the of clouds at the horizon, every shadow flickering stars, and the world seemed inexhaustible. along a game trail, and every stone tumbling down a mountainside signifies something important?

ANTHONY DOERR’s most recent book, All the Light We Cannot See, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the I sat with Inuit hunters once on sea ice off the Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in fiction and was coast of Baffin Island as they waited for narwhals. a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. He lives with his family They sat on their snowmobiles for hours in the in Boise, Idaho. endless daylight, blinking at the water as it lapped at the edges of the ice. Once in a while, a pair of binoculars went up; once in a while, someone told

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You Joyce Carol Oates

BOUGHT A BOOKSTORE. Mostly secondhand books.

Never left your hometown on the Erie Barge Canal, in upstate New York.

Never wanted to leave, because why? You have family here, relatives. High-school friends. Found a house just three blocks from the house you’d grown up in.

Fact is, you failed to get the scholarship you’d needed to escape.

So after you graduated from the local community college you got married. First man you believed you loved, and certainly the first who claimed to love you. And you and your husband bought South Main Books, where you’d spent so many enthralled hours as a schoolgirl.

By the time the elderly proprietor died, the stock had become primarily secondhand. Waterlogged, stained. Fire-scorched. Heaps of books assembled on metal bookcases with hand-printed labels: Mystery & Detective, Sci-Fi, Fantasy. Popular Fiction, Classics, History, Military History, How-To. Children’s Books. Teetering stalagmites of books rising from the floor waiting to be sorted, shelved.

And, in the cavernous basement, a vast graveyard of moldering paperbacks in bins.

Yet there was romance in such a place. A universe of books. A universe of souls. Except, unlike souls, books endured. You could hold a book in your hand, as you could not hold a soul in your hand.

You could turn the pages of a book—you could read.

In the act of reading, you could enter another time, the time of the book. It had to be a past time—a parallel time. Such an act felt subversive, secret—like dreaming, except the dream belonged to another, not to you. You could become one with sentences as they flowed like a thin stream of water over rocks—rippling, transparent. You could

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become one with the stranger who had written the book, who was not you.

You stared in wonder, mesmerized. How, on the spines of books, including the cheapest paperbacks, there was the imprint of a singular name.

A book is something to be held in the hand.

What a book is, is not so easy to summarize.

Everybody predicted that you’d go bankrupt in the first year. Then they extended the time to two years. Three years? Five? Just wait.

Unlocking the rear door of South Main Books each morning, you see that wraith of a girl in the shadows, turning the pages of a book—staring at you with startled eyes, in the very act of vanishing.

Yes, I love books. To read, not to write. I never wanted to be a writer. I will leave that to others more courageous and more reckless.

Fact is, for as long as you could remember you’d wanted to be a writer. You’d wanted to be a poet. You’d wanted to tell stories. You’d wanted to see your name on the spine of a book.

You’d wanted to hold that book in your hand.

You’d wanted to open that book, turn to the first pages. . . . Only I could have written this. Here is my truest self!

You’d begun before you could read. You’d begun with Crayolas, coloring books. Your favorite crayon colors were burnt umber, scarlet, purple.

You’d begun by copying comics out of the newspaper by hand, on tracing paper. In grade school, you illustrated your own fairy tales.

Talking-animal stories. Space-travel stories. Werewolf and vampire stories. Weird tales in the lineage of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft. In middle school, elaborate mysteries in the lineage of Ellery Queen.

You published poetry and fiction in school magazines. In the local newspaper, where there was a weekly poetry column on Sunday. Young, you’d gazed into that seductive abyss, and the abyss gazed back into you. Deeply.

Never failed to trip your heart, the sight of the front window shimmering with reflected light, and displays of books inside. South Main Books New & Secondhand. Browsers Welcome.

After you bought the bookstore, you never wrote again. Not enough time! you said. Not enough hours in the day.

Maybe it had been a mistake, you conceded.

Buying a (failing) bookstore. In a (failing) economy.

Like having kids, which you’d done (also). Like getting married (also). Maybe it’s a mistake, but you want to try it, see how it feels. When you’re young, you think you have plenty of time to change your mind. You think.

Not even a line of poetry did you write. Not for years.

Well, in fact poetry sprang from you like wildflowers pushing through the (empty) eye sockets of a skull in the woods. Lines of poems, radiant as raindrops. Melting icicles. A bird’s high trill. Like love, a mystery. Like the very word mystery—how close to misery. Falling in love, falling out of love. And, again, falling in love. All with the same man who’d had to work at a radiator factory in Niagara Falls to help support the God-damned bookstore (as he called it, with exasperated affection) that was your first love.

Shoveling books, there were so many. Needed a bulldozer to organize the basement. Needed to wear a gas mask, there were so many mold spores. So Gerard joked.

(Except, are there jokes? What is the secret meaning of laughter?)

One autumn, you repainted the interior: Robin’segg blue. Cream-colored ceiling, trim. Iridescent suns,

Image © Leah Yerpe, Callisto, 2013, graphite and ink on paper, 50" x 38."

moons, stars on the (twelve-foot, hammered-tin) ceiling. Likenesses of classic writers and poets on the walls—Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. The old gods, gazing down upon you bemused, benign. You invited local artists to display their work on your walls. Sculpture in the front window.

Anytime of day, until 6 P.M., you were in the store.

After Gerard died, you extended the hours on Thursdays and Fridays, for there was no reason to hurry home.

You initiated poetry readings at the store—high-school students, community college.

You provided coffee, cookies, brownies baked in the night when you couldn’t sleep, anyway—empty house, no husband, no kids, hours before it made sense to open the God-damned bookstore, and even then, when you arrived, you’d be the first merchant on Main Street to open.

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In wintry months, switching on lights. The sudden warmth of lights in the gloom. That wraith-girl, surprised in the act of turning away, clutching in her hand a book that no adult would have allowed her to see if they’d known. . . .

At last, aged forty-four, you dared to read your own poems. At the conclusion of an evening celebrating women’s poetry. A published woman poet from the community college, several other local poets, then you rising hesitantly, daring to read from a sheaf of typed poems in a low, hurried voice. Applause startled you, your eyes glanced up, widened and affrighted.

Were you naked, on display? How, why, had you done such a thing?

Your customers, your friends. Neighbors.

Astonished that you’d written poetry. Astonished that you’d been camouflaged among them for all your adult life. Applauding you, love for you shining in their eyes. (Re)creating South Main Books, this center for a community of loosely affiliated women and men in the very heart of the dying-out downtown of Yewville. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that you who have urged books of poetry upon customers for years turn out to be a poet, too.

The women hug you, weep over you. How brave you’ve been, since Gerard died! Keeping the store open, alone. So much effort you’ve expended, alone. They make too much of you, you think uneasily. As friends will do.

But it is safe now. Your parents are no longer living. Your husband has died. Your children who haven’t moved away from Yewville rarely come to the store to be embarrassed by their silvery-grayponytailed mother in overalls and T-shirt emblazoned with a subtly demonic likeness of Emily Dickinson.

Too late for poetry, for the sustained effort of poetry—the bookstore has become your life. What remains of your life. No intention of retiring, ever.

Hell, no. First thing they’d do, a new owner of this property, would be to dump our inventory into the trash, tear the place down, and remake it into anything other than a bookstore. Never going to happen, I promise.

But, really, what you did was you had children.

Babies sprang from your astonished body. Blood gleamed on their perfect skin, their cobalt-blue eyes opened in amazement. Who are you? What is this? Where have I come? What will happen to us?

I am not like her, that childless woman.

You’d grown up believing: Children are a blessing. Children give meaning to life. If life has

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no intrinsic meaning, nonetheless children provide meaning. Families provide meaning. Existence itself is the meaning. You give life, you sustain life. You feed, and you feed, and you feed this life. You dare not stop, for your own life would stop. You never question.

You pity those who have not had children.

That other self, the woman you are relieved you’d never become, is to be pitied—childless. Somehow you know that was part of her scheme, in escaping Yewville—to remain, to be, childless. She might have written books, established a career for herself, but what is this set beside your accomplishments—children, husband, bookstore beloved in a community?

Yet, more strongly, you resent those who did not have children, for they have escaped the fearfulness of life.

As soon as the first baby was born, already in the hospital you understood: Oh, God. This gift I have been given I must keep alive.

Your (young) husband, gripping your hand in the hospital. Beside your hospital bed. Wiping at his eyes wet with tears and with the panic of realization: We are responsible—“parents.”

Jointly, you knew: as long as the child draws breath, you live in terror that that breath will cease.

You pray to die first. In secret, you pray to die first. Cannot bear even to contemplate outliving your child.

For your lifetime, this is the sentence. A life sentence.

The girl who’d wanted so badly to escape Yewville, and to become—somewhere, somehow— a writer: She has never experienced this clutching of the heart when the phone rings, late. She has never experienced absurd scenarios of accidents, premature deaths in the family. You pity her. You do not envy her.

How you parted ways. In total innocence, ignorance.

Anxiously preparing for the state Regents exam at the age of eighteen. Determined to perform well.

To excel. To fling yourself away from home as you might toss dice exuberantly onto a tabletop.

But the snowy-bright morning of the exam you’d been distracted, exhausted. You had not slept more than an hour or two the night before. Your father had returned home late, his footsteps heavy on the stairs. Your mother had spoken sharply to him, and he had spoken sharply to her. There’d been a shutting of doors. Muffled voices within. Confused with the beating of your heart. Confused with your anxiety over the future. Dear God, help me. I will be a good person forevermore if…

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

than yours, but—somehow—she’d performed well Since elementary school, your grades had on the exam. You congratulated her, you were been high. Particularly in English, history, biology. happy for her. (Not for yourself. You were not happy You were not so strong in math. You gave up too for yourself. But, for Sandra, you were happy.) quickly in math; you felt your eyelids flutter, staring Eventually, you would take courses at the at problems, a kind of willful blindness. For it was predicted: Girls do not do well in math. Girls should not feel anxiety, if they are not quite so gifted as boys in math. Or in science. For a girl, this is good “You would blame your teachers, who had work. No need to push yourself so hard. always seemed to like you but (perhaps) did Light-headed, with a sore throat. Spasmodic not take you seriously. Your poetry and your coughing. Your balance seemed off, as if you were short stories they praised, but in the way making your way across the pitching deck of a ship. that adults praise young children. Without Uncomprehending, you stared at some of the exam quite reading you, perhaps. Surely, without questions. Words swirled, tangled like knots. The knowing who you were.” remainder of your life depending upon this performance: two hours on a January morning, when you were a senior at Yewville High, eighteen years old. community college. You believed yourself superior You panicked, you were perspiring, trembling. to your instructors at the college, but you had no You would blame your quarreling parents. You choice but to please them. To receive good grades, would blame your teachers, who had always you had to please them. Flatter them. You hoped seemed to like you but (perhaps) did not take you to transfer to a four-year college or university, but seriously. Your poetry and your short stories they that did not happen. Much you’d hoped for did not praised, but in the way that adults praise young happen. Even if you’d received a scholarship to a children. Without quite reading you, perhaps. university, you might have had to remain in Yewville Surely, without knowing who you were. to help support your mother after the collapse Eventually, you would blame yourself. For who of your parents’ marriage; in time, you had to look else was there to blame? after your mother when she was ill with cancer; It was your usual practice to answer exam quesyou had to take on some of the household duties of tions swiftly. To answer the questions you knew, an adult. Through no fault of yours, you’d become and knew that you knew, in order to give yourself one of the adults of the world by the age of twenty, time to spend on other, more difficult questions. and the world was no longer open to you, as it had But today you ran out of time. Fumbling, faltering, seemed when you were eighteen. you lost confidence in yourself. The final questions You remained in Yewville. Gnawing at your were rushed. Your head rang with pain. Within a embittered heart. few days, you would be diagnosed with bronchitis, But no, not at all. You were not embittered; which you would have, with varying degrees of you were grateful to be needed. To love and to be intensity, for six weeks. You’d left the exam room loved. Eventually, you would marry, as your girl dispirited, defeated. The next day, and for days cousins and friends married, in the years following afterward, you’d tormented yourself with thoughts high school. And you and your husband would of suicide. Hating yourself, in disgust with yourself. make a down payment on South Main Books; you Expecting the worst. Finally talking yourself into would secure a mortgage and put your life in hock accepting failure—defeat. Probably you hadn’t for the next thirty years, as Gerard said. scored as high on the exam as you’d hoped; that was But that exam!—the morning of that exam! only reasonable to expect.

Waking in the night, you recall. In the grocery store, And it was true: your score was above average, pushing a cart—you recall. Shelving books, ringing but not exceptional. Others in your class scored up a sale. Leafing through a newly published book higher, though they were certainly not superior of poetry, you recall. Your fevered skin, sensitive to you. It was a matter of shame to you, an outrage, to the touch. Swallowing with pain, unease. Others unfair and unjust, yet irrevocable. You’d had your in the examination room, row after row of your chance—that morning. And now that morning classmates, strangers to you now, deadly competiwas past. tors. Frowning, earnest, determined. For only those One of your closest friends would attend Cornell students who had some reasonable expectation of on a Regents scholarship, while you remained in doing well on this lengthy exam troubled to take it.

Yewville. Your friend had never had higher grades

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You’d always been one of the highest-achieving girls in your class, and yet—things did not turn out well for you after all.

The other girl, the one you were meant to be, had scored very high on the exam: upper one percentile of high-school seniors who’d taken the exam that day in the state of New York. That girl had gone on to attend a first-rate university. She’d studied exactly the subjects you’d hoped to study: literature, philosophy, psychology. She’d been praised for her excellent critical writing and for her poetry and fiction. Her professors had encouraged her. No one had discouraged her. Her parents had not quarreled; her father had not been an alcoholic who walked away from his family when his wife was first diagnosed with cancer. That girl knew nothing of the dread of waiting for her mother to be discharged from the infusion room at the hospital, of helping her walk down the hospital steps, trying not to be nauseated by the smell of chemicals on her skin, in her hair. That girl knew nothing of the fear of being pregnant when it was not a good time to be pregnant. That girl did not weep in a man’s arms that she might persuade him to marry her though (she guessed) he did not really love her, as she did not really love him. Unfettered as a child in a place other than Yewville, where she would have been held captive as surely as an insect in an elaborate spiderweb, that girl began to write seriously as an undergraduate: poetry, short fiction, a novel. She began to be taken seriously by supportive adults.

She had not even known how ambitious she seemed to others, and how fortunate. She’d believed herself to be no more exceptional than certain of her friends, particularly you; indeed, she is you.

You never think of her. You haven’t in years.

In Yewville, in the life you do not think of as left behind, you have been happy. For happiness is measured differently here, in a quieter inlet opening onto a rushing river; life is slower here than on the great, rushing river, but perhaps it is deeper. (You want to think.)

And now, at the age of forty-four, you have returned to writing, on a modest scale. The other girl, grown now into a woman, a “known” person, has certainly not been modest—she has published many books, she has been the recipient of awards.

She has been translated into languages of which you have never heard. You don’t envy her, however.

You don’t think of her at all. Would you trade your life for hers?—would you trade yourself for her?— certainly not.

You would not have wished to marry a man other than Gerard. And Gerard was available to you

Image © Leah Yerpe, Daphne’s Roots II, 2014, graphite and ink on paper, 50" x 38."

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only in Yewville, where you were both born. And, from Gerard, your children. Without Gerard in your life, your children would not be in your life. Your children would not exist.

In any case, you are a widow now. You are something of a hero—a heroine—to local women your own age and younger. You are famously generous with time, if not money. (You have not an excess of money.)

You have helped establish a local literary magazine. You have encouraged younger readers who come into the bookstore. Your body has softened, slackened. Once, you were lean and hard-muscled as a race horse, your nerves strung tight as wire; now you are a cushiony sort of person, prone to hugging and being hugged. You wear loose sweaters, jeans.

You wear caftans, denim jackets, sandals. Your adult children roll their eyes, seeing you, your hair skinned back from your face, your silvery-gray hair in a swinging ponytail. Your skin is ruddy, flushed. Often, you feel feverish. It is an excitement for life, you think. For the surprise, the unexpected livingness of life. You are no beauty—you look your age. Fine lines crisscross your face. Between your eyes, a vertical line. Bracketing your mouth, smile lines. Thank God you have never been concerned about money. Ignominious and embarrassing, to care about money.

Your relatives shake their heads; behind your back they are still predicting the bankruptcy of South Main Books. Not surprising that, in middle age, you don’t have adequate medical coverage.

Out of pride, as well as satisfaction for the life that you have, you never think of that other life beyond Yewville. The girl who’d taken up her pen, attacked the Regents exam with confidence, with intelligence. The girl who’d managed to remain calm. Whose (selfish, unthinking) parents hadn’t quarreled and kept her awake on the eve of the most important morning of her life. The girl without a sore throat, a racking cough.

You shake your head irritably—in fact, happily.

Don’t ask me, what a silly question. Of course I’m happy. I have everything I want. What is missing from my life? Not a thing.

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of numerous works of prose fiction, poetry, memoir, and essays. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Medal of the Humanities, and, not least, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Festival of Literature and Art with Humor (Bilbao, Spain). She is currently visiting professor of English at UC Berkeley.

THE YELLOW WOOD BILLY COLLINS Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, but then those two roads diverged again and kept diverging like branches diverge in a tree into more branches, until you head down one last road and die.

It’s disquieting to think of life that way, as a series of binary choices, each one leaving behind a road forsaken.

No, you can’t go down two at a time and be both a candle-maker and a crook.

But you’re free to dream of the other.

Take this poet, elbows on the sill, imagining my life as a baker or a tinker, that is, a person who goes from place to place (though I’ve grown weary of traveling) mending metal utensils on his way, as if those people who spent their lives compiling this dictionary had any idea what tinkering actually means, what solitude and hardship such a life entails.

BILLY COLLINS is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Aimless Love. A distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and senior distinguished fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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WHAT IS A NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE? Between 1750 and 1840, the tiny island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, was known as one of the whaling capitals of the world. Right whales, humpbacks, and sperm whales were hunted off the American coast. Their oil was used to fuel lamps and to lubricate the machines that powered the Industrial Revolution; ambergris was used as a perfume fixative, and various parts were harvested to make a variety of products, such

Image © Photographer Name

as buggy whips, fishing poles, corset stays and dress hoops. Lucrative and dangerous, whaling permeated the economy, the culture, and the language.

New phrases entered the language, from “there she blows” to “whale away” to “Nantucket sleigh ride,” which whalers coined to describe what happens after the harpooners struck a whale. The massive animal would take

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off, swimming powerfully on the surface of the water while dragging five or six men in a longboat in its wake. Humpbacks pulled the fastest, sperm whales would drag sailors for the longest, reaching speeds of 23 mph, and fin and sei whales were the most dangerous species, as they would dive deep into the ocean, pulling the longboat beneath the surface. The sailors would bump over waves for miles, until the whale, exhausted,

Nantucket Sleigh Ride Triptych by Jac and Patricia Johnson, Three Points Design. Four Winds Craft Guild/Sylvia's Antiques, Nantucket, MA.

WHAT AUTHOR IS A NAME NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE?

gave up. The sailors, if they survived, would kill the animal and harvest its oil. Fishermen and sailors still use the phrase “Nantucket sleigh ride” when the ocean takes them on a ride they can’t quite control.

The discovery of petroleum and natural gas in Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s began a slow end to American whale hunting.

Image © Photographer Name

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What If Anna Deavere Smith

WHEN I WAS A KID GROWING UP IN BALTIMORE, on the colored side of town, I went to see the movie West Side Story. The ending broke my heart. I imagine it broke yours, too. I got home, sat down at the kitchen table, and sobbed. I could not stop sobbing.

My mother made a declaration: “That’s it. You can’t be a psychiatrist, you’re too sensitive.” That had been my plan, to be a psychiatrist.

Nobody talked about psychiatrists, psychiatry, or mental health. If one of us kids was particularly ill-behaved, we’d be threatened with being sent to Crownsville. Crownsville—a.k.a. Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane, a.k.a. Crownsville State Hospital—was an institution for colored people who suffered from mental illness. In our minds, it conjured up images of a nineteenth-century madhouse (not that we knew what a nineteenth-century madhouse was, but perhaps we’d seen a film that represented one). This was said humorously. A threat of Crownsville in my household, or the households of my close friends, was tantamount to the expression “Are you crazy?” A reprimand, but not a serious threat.

But colored children were sent to Crownsville. The institution housed both children and adults. It was opened in 1911. The state closed it in 2004. The conditions there were dire, to say the least. When a patient died, other patients made the coffin and carried it to the grave. People were more likely to die there than to leave having received help. At Crownsville, there were no names on the grave markers, just numbers.

The lady who lived next door was probably the person who put me on the path to thinking, by the age of eleven, that I wanted to be a psychiatrist.

She was a very pretty, soft-spoken woman. She

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taught science at one of the two all-Negro high schools. She had a wonderful wardrobe. I will call her Miss Vera. (We children never called any adult by his or her first name, and Miss could mean “Miss” or “Mrs.”) Miss Vera’s husband always had snazzy cars that he kept in great shape. He was out there washing the car on a regular basis. Everything in that household seemed to be in perfect order. Then she disappeared. I never got a straight answer when I asked my mother what had happened to her. But, one day, she appeared at our screen door, in a bathrobe, with her hair disheveled. She wanted to talk with my mother. My mother sat with her in the living room, and they spoke in hushed tones. This began to happen frequently. Miss Vera would disappear for some time, and when she came back she’d come to our front door, often, and ask to speak with my mother, and they’d talk quietly in the living room. Finally, what my mother told me was anecdotal. She said that one day Miss Vera started hollering at the kids in school—telling them that they were stupid and would never learn. And they took her off. I could not imagine Miss Vera doing something like that. The thought of it horrified me, pricked my curiosity further, and broke my heart.

Then there was a man I’ll call Mr. Matt. He would stand outside our house at 3 or 4 A.M., or sometime when most people on the block were in bed. He would call out for my father: “Dea – ver!”

Over and over. My father would go downstairs and sit with him in the living room. When one of us asked my mother why Mr. Matt did that, the answer was that before the war he had been a brilliant man, but something terrible had happened, and he’d never been the same. My brothers laughed at Mr. Matt’s behavior and mimicked his disabled body and his garbled high-pitched wailing, but it broke my heart.

I was filled with curiosity about where Mr. Matt and Miss Vera were when they disappeared. What if I’d gone on that path? My mother’s declaration that I was too sensitive, notwithstanding, I suppose I could have survived that one bit of discouragement and made my way down that road, either as a psychiatrist with an M.D. or as a psychiatric social worker. It would have been an interesting ride. Likely I would have visited Crownsville and seen nineteenth-century horrors being applied to members of my race. I read somewhere that children were injected with the hepatitis virus as late as the 1960s.

Perhaps a required essay would have revealed my Angry Black Woman feelings toward Johns Hopkins, so esteemed up on the hill, which did not admit Negro mental-health patients until the 1960s.

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Though many say that the field does not have much to show for itself other than drugs, some say some of those drugs really did help people. One thing’s for sure: If I had been a psychiatrist, I would have watched a slow lifting of the taboo. It’s outrageous that we don’t have a good mental-health system in this country, and the stigmas that are attached don’t help. On the other hand, mental illness is hardly hush-hush anymore. Even as I write this, the Wall Street Journal features the following: “US Life Expectancy Falls as Suicides and Opioid Deaths Rise.” It’s too bad it’s taken so long to bring things out into the open. Imagine the progress we could have made. Imagine the progress we can now make, as our culture accepts that the road is not without real pain and suffering for some folks, sometimes those in our own families, and certainly in our workplaces, our neighborhoods.

According to my mother, I could not be a psychiatrist because I was too “sensitive.” I became

“It’s outrageous that we don’t have a good mental-health system in this country, and the stigmas that are attached don’t help.

On the other hand, mental illness is hardly hush-hush anymore.” an actor, a field in which you can’t be too sensitive, can’t be too emotional. When it comes to acting, all those who are too sensitive walk right up! All those who cry easily, step right up! Actors live in a perpetual state of “what if.” Maybe that question would also have been at the center of my work on the road I did not take. I’d be asking my patients “what if” as we tried to find out what was getting in the way of their joy and productivity. I’d be pushing around “what if” with my colleagues as we worked to make the field as robust as it needs to be.

Actress, playwright, and teacher, ANNA DEAVERE SMITH is said to have created a new form of theater. Her most recent play, Notes from the Field, explores issues of justice and opportunity in America through the lens of education.

Her television work includes the new Shonda Rhimes series For the People, in addition to The West Wing, Black-ish, and Nurse Jackie. Her films include The American President, Rachel Getting Married, and Philadelphia. She is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Awards she has received include the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.

Image © Leah Yerpe, Apus, 2012, graphite and ink on paper, 50" x 18."

ANNA DEVEARE SMITH

,

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A CURIOUS DREAM LEWIS CARROLL An Excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister.

“Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice. And she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and , when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea: it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream: First, she dreamed about little Alice herself: once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the frightened Mouse

Opposite page: "You're nothing but a pack of cards!”

Sir John Tenniel. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

LEWIS CARROLL

splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sob of the miserable Mock Turtle.

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd-boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

LEWIS CARROLL (1832-1898), the pen name of the Oxford mathematician, logician, photographer, and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is famous the world over for his fantastic classics “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “Through the Looking Glass,” “The Hunting of the Snark,” “Jabberwocky,” and “Sylvie and Bruno.”

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Alternate Ambitions Renée Fleming

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I definitely wanted

to succeed at something; to be seen. Even as a child, I had creative ambition, but that drive wasn’t necessarily directed toward singing.

Without Internet and 24/7 media coverage, my generation was relatively naïve. It was easier to dream big back then. There was no reason one couldn’t become an astronaut or, in my case, the first female president—my earliest dream. I trained and showed horses, so becoming a veterinarian was also something I thought about. And I was a composer, although I didn’t know of any women composers. Despite the dreaming, there wasn’t a clear road map for any of these goals.

By the time I went off to college, the path of least resistance was music education, because my parents were both music educators. But my ambition remained, and I forged my own trajectory.

I sang jazz with a trio while at school, and the great Illinois Jacquet invited me to tour with his band.

I turned the opportunity down, because I was quite shy and felt more comfortable in an academic environment. I went to graduate school instead of going on the road. I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany. Initially, it was a terrifying experience, being alone in a foreign country without the ability to communicate. Despite my anxiety, quitting wasn’t an option, though, and I developed resilience.

But, even after establishing a career in opera, I imagined other ventures. The role of entrepreneur might have suited me best, given the creative nature of developing a product. I almost started a clothing company very early in my career. I was in South America and had designed some prototypes of unstructured travel apparel. Later on,

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and long before we began seeing spas in airports, I had that idea. A friend urged me on: “Let’s create a business plan. Let’s get it done.” But, being a working mother and traveling as much as I did, I soon realized that managing any kind of enterprise would be another full-time job. Once, I came close to purchasing Ventfort Hall, a historic Gilded Age mansion in the Berkshires that was in foreclosure.

Fortunately, friends talked me out of it, and today it’s a museum. Clothes, spas, mansions—all the trappings of a diva.

Now, if I had to pick one alternative life, I might become a neuroscientist. The challenge of mastering operatic virtuosity has focused me on the mindbody connection, performance psychology, and, more recently, the brain. In my role as artistic adviser to the Kennedy Center, I have spearheaded an inspiring project with both the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Arts called Sound Health: Music and the Mind. Focusing on the intersection of music and neuroscience, this initiative explores emerging research on the therapeutic power of music for childhood development, Alzheimer’s, autism, PTSD, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few. I’ve become increasingly passionate about this work, and I strive to advocate on behalf of both science and the arts.

Everywhere I perform, I try to connect performing-arts organizations with their local health-care providers, universities, and researchers to amplify the power of the arts beyond entertainment. Audiences enjoy learning more about the value of the artistic pursuits they treasure.

I would love to scale up. I’m in the process of figuring out where I take it from here, and I’m thinking big.

RENÉE FLEMING is one of the most highly acclaimed singers of our time. The winner of four Grammy Awards, and honored with the National Medal of Arts by President Obama, Renée has sung for momentous occasions ranging from the Diamond Jubilee Concert for Queen Elizabeth II, at Buckingham Palace, to the Super Bowl. Renée earned a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the 2018 Broadway production of Carousel. She will appear in the opening performances of The Shed in New York this spring, and in the London premiere of The Light in the Piazza in June. She was featured on the soundtrack of the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2018, The Shape of Water, and her new album, Renée Fleming: Broadway, was released last September.

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LEVITATION LEAH YERPE Leah Yerpe is a young artist from Cattaraugus County, New York, who graduated from Pratt Institute in 2009. Her meticulous and labyrinthine drawings of human figures twist and spiral and float across our issue, capturing our uniquely human capacity for transformation.

Image Š Leah Yerpe, Stasis, 2008, charcoal on paper, 100" x 132."

AUTHOR NAME

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“I would have taken that internship at the Mexican American Embassy right out of college and have worked my way up to diplomat status, where I’d be using my Spanish for much more fruitful purposes than to just order tacos occasionally.”

— Clea Alsip (Elsie/She)

“The only other job I’ve ever had was delivering pizzas, and I spent it listening to show tunes in the car. Maybe by now I’d own a Broadwaythemed pizzeria, selling pies like the Willie Loman (ham, whipped cheese, and bitter herbs), the Dolly Levi (pure schmaltz), and the Godot (which never arrives).”

— David Gallo, Set Design Image © Photographer Name

WAY

“It is possible I could be telling you to SHHHH! My love of books, the particular textures, aromas, mysterious labyrinthian shelves, and thrilling silence made me swoon for libraries, and I could be there reshelving thick tomes whilst sporting cat-eye spectacles and my hair coiled up in a topknot. But this library still uses card catalogs and houses tangible hardbacks. Computers and e-books are not my marmalade.”

— Tina Benko (Antonia/Alice)

“What if I weren’t a performer, so, if I only had a brain? I’d be a blind shopper for a massage chain, a wildlife photographer in extreme climates,— give away money for the Gates Foundation to worthy idea people, a taster for Lindt chocolates, setting up control centers at points of disaster, Red Cross ‘first team in’ guy, or make prosthetics for animals. I wish I were Zelig, oh to be in a hundred rooms where it’s happening. But I’ve done a lot in my time. I’d like to rescue animals from the end of a poacher’s gun. Can I be president? Clearly, anything is possible these days.”

— Douglas Sills (Schuyler/ Walt Disney/ Dr. Harbinger)

“I stick with computer science at Stanford and get scooped up by a nascent Google upon graduation. After amassing a small fortune and having a nervous breakdown at thirty-five, I spend the rest of my life wondering if I should have pursued acting instead.”

— Jordan Gelber (Gilbert)

ANOTHER

THE CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM IMAGINE WHAT THEIR BIOS WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE IF THEY'D TAKEN A DIFFERENT PATH

“I’d be making old-fashioned hats in my very own hat shop. Homburgs and fedoras and pillboxes, oh my! There’d always be one on my head, even at the Laundromat.”

— Grace Rex (Lilac)

“I was almost a professional blood donor, but I was too weak to take the final exam.

Or I’d be happily making cheese at the monastery.”

—John Larroquette (Mundie)

“Many years ago, in the face of the confusing global order, I had to remember that distant afternoon that my father took me to discover ice.

“Professional skydiver, which, when I think about it, isn’t really that much different from working in theater. True story: twenty years ago the Nantucket lighting designer Howell Binkley convinced me to skydive for the first time.

What he said was ‘Do it, man!

It’ll change your life!’ He was right.”

— Mark Bennett, Sound Design and Original Music

“I’d live in a world where when asked to imagine an alternate life story, I’d be short of ideas, because I am truly happy and free in the one I’m currently living and couldn’t possibly imagine it any other way.”

— Stacey Sargeant (Aubrey Coffin/Secretary)

“If I hadn’t become a director, I’d still be acting like I did my first ten years in New York.

If I hadn’t fallen in love with the theater, I’d be head of Proctology at Mt. Sinai, with a large practice and a small collection of motorcycles. I’d also play electric guitar with my band on the weekends.”

— Jerry Zaks, Director

“Food designer. Like someone who figures out how to make McDonald’s burgers look really juicy and delicious in the commercials.”

—Adam Chanler-Berat (Poe)

“If I’d have taken that old prospector up on his offer, I imagine I would have ended up in that mercury mine in Tucipita alongside the McQuirtsie triplets. Blayton or Traz would have given us their congenital whooping hiccups. Too loud and worthless, we’d have been sold up-jungle to the Maloca Toucan jugglers.”

— Will Swenson (McPhee)

ANOTHER AUTHOR NAME WAY

I, who have been many men, have never been what Jorge Luis Borges is in Nantucket Sleigh Ride.

I would have liked to have been present at an impossible evening, at the invitation of Fidel Castro in Havana, to share stories with Jorge Luis Borges, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Pablo Neruda, and John Guare.”

— Germán Jaramillo (Borges)

“Picking wildflowers and clipping wayward branches and berries to make verdant floral arrangements and daisy chains for springtime crowns. Making good use of my Brooklyn Botanic Garden classes!”

— Emily Rebholz, Costume Design

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Image © Photographer Name

PERSONA JOHN STEZAKER John Stezaker is a contemporary artist best known for his collages of found images taken from vintage photographs and old Hollywood film stills, and ephemera. His work is almost surgical in its precision and simplicity. Stezaker explains that his ideal process is to do “very little to the images, maybe just one cut: the smallest change or the most minimal mutilation. What I do is destructive, but also an act of deliberate passivity.” His alluring juxtapositions subvert our expectations and ask us to question our assumptions about the role of photography as a tool for documenting truth. His meticulous

creations have wit and drama and viewing them in the context of Nantucket Sleigh Ride, they also evoke the thin line that separates who we are from who we might have been.

Opposite page: Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) CXI, 2013, Collage.

Photo © FXP Photography; This page: (top row, left to right) She (Film Portrait Collage) V, 2007, Collage. Photo © Alex Delfanne; Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXIV, 2007, Collage; Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXIV, 2007, Collage. (bottom row, left to right) Untitled (Film Portrait Collage) XXXII, 2008, Collage. Photo © Alex Delfanne; Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) LXI, 2010, Collage. Photo © Alex Delfanne. All images courtesy of the artist and the Approach Gallery, London.

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