This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.
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Big news: novelist/memoirist/wonderful human Mira Jacob will be stepping into the host chair this spring! This week, she and Jordan sit down for a pass-the-baton chat—kicking off with a flashback to the very first Thresholds episode (and interview) from February 2020, with Mira herself.
Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!
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Mentioned:
Mira’s Thresholds interview • “What You Might Not Know About ‘Getting Roofied’” by Jordan Kisner • Mira in conversation with Saeed Jones and Kiese Laymon for Bookable
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Mira on how she selected her guests:
One of the things that has sustained me so much in my own life as a person who makes things is talking to other people who make things, and specifically people who are community oriented, people who create communities through their work, who rely on community to create the things they create and who put things back into their communities as kind of maps forward or amulets for the ride, or whatever you want to think of it as.
And so I thought of those people who, whether I know them well or not, have offered to me another piece in this map of how to stay in relationships with other people and find a way forward, which is something I have truly missed about life. About how we’ve been negotiating humanity for a little while.
So I looked for those people. I looked for the people who, for me, are sustenance, and whose work both gives something interesting to the world, but also who, when I am engaging with them and what they put into the world, it makes me want to be a different kind of human, and it makes me want to reach out and find connections with people where so much of me has been taught to walk away.
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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.
Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. It is currently in development as a television series with Film 44. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, and the Telegraph. She is currently the visiting professor at MFA Creative Writing program at The New School, and a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.
