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.