This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Aisha Ghul-Savush read her story, Notions

of the Sacred, from the January 2nd and 9th 2023 issue of the magazine.

Savush is the author of Two Novels, Walking on the Sealing, which was published in 2019,

White on White, which came out in 2021.

Now here is Aisha Ghul-Savush.

Notions of the Sacred

I once heard a woman say that immediately upon finding out, she'd felt the dawning of

a strange inner power.

It seemed as though she could undertake any task, could live through any hardship.

This was a strength not of muscles the woman said, but of light.

In this new form of herself, she felt more alive than she ever had before.

She was recounting all this once it was already over, after she'd had an abortion, but her

memory of that brief experience was still tinted by her encounter with what she now believed

to be a mortality.

The woman's story stayed with me, and I thought about her words when I myself found out, searching

my body in mind for signs of my own power.

I can't say that I felt it, not in the way that the woman had described, but I certainly

sensed the shift, as if I'd entered a different dimension and from then on inhabit two worlds

at once, one steady and flat, and the other mysterious, with depths I could not yet

fathom but knew were there.

...