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Each week, WORDTheatre shares a brilliant short story performed live in LA, NY or London by a great actor. Like what you hear? Visit WORDTheatre.org/Membership/ to enjoy live events and recordings by becoming a Patron or Enthusiast Member! WORDTheatre® is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the US and a Dual Charitable Trust in the UK. We are on a mission to make a better world one story at a time.
CEDERING FOX
Hello and welcome to WORDTheatre Weekly! I’m your host, Cedering Fox, WORDTheatre's Founder & Artistic Director.
It's summer and we’re changing things up for the next seven weeks with our new series of Staff picks. Each week you'll meet a member of the team, hear one of their favorite stories and then their interview with the story's author.
For the record, WORDTheatre holds the copyright to these recordings so no portion of anything you hear may be reproduced without permission. Also, these stories cannot be transcribed as there are underlying rights issues and that would be in violation of copyright law.
In advance, I would like to say thank you to Philanthropist and Benefactor, Ola Strøm and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture for their ongoing support of this podcast, to Jonathan Sacks for composing our theme music, to all our interns and to you our listeners. Now, take it away team!
SAKO ANTONYAN
Hi! My name is Sarkis Antonyan and I’m a Literary Research Intern at WORDTheatre this summer! A little about me: I’m from Los Angeles, California, and I’m a Dual Degree student at both the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University studying Interior Architecture, Urban Studies, and Literary Arts. I am also a writer of poetry, personal essays, and plays. Today, I’m picking not one, but three, short stories by the talented Aimee Bender.
Bender’s story “Each Day is the Same Backward and Forward: Day 84” draws me back to the COVID-19 pandemic, where, in quarantine, I turned to the magical essence of language, that alchemy found in creative writing to express my inner monologue and find comfort in the chaos of that time. I began penning my first proper poems at the turn of the summer of 2020, holed up in my bedroom in what felt like an infinite suspension of waiting and anticipation. Composing poetry across forms like odes, villanelles, and more experimental kinds like visual poetry and hybrid works became my form of play in the domestic interior as the world collectively dealt with a public health emergency.
I’d revel in the audial and textural qualities of language when I engaged with literary devices like alliteration, anaphora, and imagery. Palindromes have always offered a similar whimsical feeling. When I was younger, they felt like these weird, cool, linguistic tricks that I’d memorize and list off to friends or family, all of us impressed by that duality in the words you can almost miss, or the way that sounds echo each other symmetrically. In this story, we find a speaker, a mother, trying to amuse her children with a sign that leads to bigger revelations about the monotone, frustratingly directionless time people have to endure when taking precautions for the greater good of health in the midst of a pandemic. Bender’s diction and the compositions that her sentence variety takes encapsulate me. I’m obsessed with how the long run-on sentence at the very end of the piece reflects the unstable, continual, and hard-to-define feeling of life in quarantine, those weeks where all the days run into each other. Cassidy Freeman performs the voice of a tired and apprehensive mother impeccably, adding a level of humor to Bender’s writing that complements the story’s at times existential, glum moods. Her reading reminded me of the feelings I felt a few years ago, the ways in which I turned to my loved ones more than ever and how laughter over simple things kept us optimistic in that lulled, anxious, and depleted state.
And if you like this story, stay tuned for two others by Aimee Bender, performed by Jason Isaacs and Roma Maffia.
Without further ado, get ready to hear Cassidy Freeman perform "Each Day is the Same Backward and Forward,” Jason Isaacs perform "The Meeting,” and Roma Maffia perform “Appleless,” all by Aimee Bender
.