Alison Armstrong

Gazelle Alison Armstrong

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly. Their accents varyan 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 womans 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 Ismenethe lonely, hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigonein the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, again, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.