Gazelle

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly. Their accents vary—an East Coast American professor in “Driving,” “Oxbridge” is British with a tinge of Irish in “Hippo Club,” “Mose Konen,” and “The Man in the Apple-Green Tie.” And for the narrator of “Ostraneni,” the reader may imagine the dialect of a member of the elite of ancient fifth century BC Athens. Four of these monologues are in a female voice: the elderly woman’s aggressive/defensive voice of “Gazelle” came to me in a dream shortly after I had moved to New York City to live in the early 1980s, the naive voice of a Midwestern girl recounts a childhood trauma in “Snakedoctors,” a subdued young woman tells of her relationship to her parents in “At the Lake House,” and Bronze Age Greek accents of Ismene—the lonely, hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigone—in the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, again, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.