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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For her last episode as guest-host, Mira Jacob chats with former mentee Gina Chung about her debut novel Sea Change, writing about the honest messy stuff, and learning to take better care of yourself (mind, body, and spirit) for the long-haul creative practice.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

The bats under Congress Bridge in Austin, TX • “The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat” by Gina Chung (at >F(r)iction) • The Daniels accepting the Oscar for Best Picture

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From the conversation:

Mira Jacob: You can tell that girl [an earlier Gina] not to panic, which I appreciate. I also told her not to panic. What else would you tell her?

Gina Chung: I would also tell her to take care of herself. It sounds so basic, but it’s so true. At this point in the process of this book, I’ve burnt myself out so many times. Not just because of the novel but because of all the competing demands of being a person in the world, of having a full-time job to be accountable to, and also working on other writing projects.

There have been so many times in the last two to three years where I’ve hit that productivity rock bottom and thought to myself, oh my gosh, it’s gone. I don’t have any more creative juice or willpower. Wherever it was that I was getting inspiration, the well has dried up and I don’t know what to do.

And every single time the answer has just been to rest. But every single time I’m still so panicked that this is the end of the road. I’ve had to tell myself to take that time whenever I can and really listen to myself, too, in those moments. If you don’t rest your body and your brain, eventually they will make you. And when that happens, it can be really challenging. It’s better for you to choose to take that break than be forced to by life circumstances.

It’s so easy for me to not listen to my body and to just keep on going with whatever it is I think I have to get done until I’m at the end of my rope. And I’m like, why am I so tired? I’m crying at everything and everything is so hard. And the answer is usually that I’ve burnt myself out in some way.

With writing, I want this to be a long career for me. And in order to do that, I really had to learn how to make friends with not just my mind and my creativity, but also with my body. To think about what it means to be in this container of a body and how to ensure that it gets through the long haul, essentially.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer. Born in Queens and raised in New Jersey, she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of SEA CHANGE (2023 B&N Discover Pick for April; Vintage, March 28, 2023; out in the Commonwealth on April 13, 2023 and in the UK on August 10, 2023 from Picador) a novel about climate change, giant Pacific octopuses, and family, and GREEN FROG (Vintage, 2024; out in the UK/Commonwealth from Picador in 2024) a collection of short stories that explore themes of Korean American womanhood, bodies and animals. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School’s Creative Writing Program and a BA in literary studies from Williams College. She is an alumnus of several workshops and/or craft intensives, including the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Sevilla Writers House, The Center for Fiction, Kweli, and Tin House.

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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In this episode, J Wortham (Black Futures) joins guest host Mira Jacob to talk about the power of changes—changing location, changing names, changing pronouns—and the space that can open up as a result of them. Plus, the differences between NYC and LA, and some love for benevolent conspiracies!

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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From the conversation:

J Wortham: Not being in New York helped me ease into whatever metaphorical new set of baggy pants. There was something about being out of my rhythm and out of my life and out of the expectations. I didn’t have to work as hard to step into a new sense of self or a new way of being.

I think because LA is so sprawling and so spread out and people self-hibernate a lot, there’s a lot more spaciousness for solitude and self-identification, self-acceptance, self-knowing. I mean, I was not in LA for that long, so what I’m about to say is just a sliver of an observation. It’s a true generalization. It may not be real, just my experience.

Mira Jacob: Got you.

J Wortham: But I wondered if because LA is so sprawling and people hibernate a lot, there’s a different type of knowing that one has to have of themselves there, that is separate from New York knowing. In New York, you have to know different things to survive.

And in New York, it’s so dense and you’re always bumping into people—people you know, people you don’t know, people you want to know, people you don’t want to know—and you’re always negotiating other people. I don’t always have the luxury of time in New York to think about who I am and how I want to present and how I want to appear, because I just don’t have as much time.

Mira Jacob: Yeah, you’re in the mix.

J Wortham: You’re in the mix. You got to go. You got to get on the train if you’re going to make that meeting, if you’re going to make that show. You got to call the Uber now. And sometimes you just make it work with what you have.

But when I was in LA, there was just a lot more spaciousness because I was on sabbatical. My social life wasn’t as busy because of LA and also because I didn’t know as many people. And I felt, too, in the circles that I was moving in, there wasn’t such an attachment to who I was. A lot of people didn’t know who the hell I was. I’d say I’m a writer and people’d be like, oh, what shows? And I’d be like, er, a book. And everyone’s like, oh, who cares? Immediately bored.

And there was freedom in that. I’ve never experienced that. I came to New York at 25 and started working for The New York Times. I’ve always been something of a known quantity here. Out there, I wasn’t beholden to anybody. And at a certain point I was like, I’m not even beholden to myself. So who am I trying to people-please? Because nobody out here is checking for me. And that was really freeing.

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Mentioned:

Alejandro’s Run in LA • Still Processing • Kristy from The Babysitter’s Club

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

J Wortham (they/them) is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation. J is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and co-host of the podcast Still Processing. They occasionally publish thoughts on culture, technology and wellness in a newsletter. J is the proud editor of the visual anthology Black Futures, a 2020 Editor’s choice by The New York Times Book Review, along with Kimberly Drew, from One World. J is also currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press. J mostly lives and works on stolen Munsee Lenape land, now known as Brooklyn, New York, and is committed to decolonization as a way of life.

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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In this episode, legendary cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From) joins guest host Mira Jacob to talk about building a life out of odd jobs, the double-edged sword of being “the first,” and how being a cartoonist was never on her mind until it happened.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

Brumsic Brandon, Jr. (Barbara’s father, creator of the comic Luther) • Marie Brown • Jules Feiffer’s Village Voice strip • Women’s Wear Daily

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From the conversation:

Mira Jacob: Can we talk a minute about being the first? I’m always really interested in this. So I’m Indian-American. I do graphic work as well, and I do novels, but I’m part of what is sort of the first part of the diaspora in America, and I’m often told by people in those rooms, Oh, you’re the first. At first, I took great pleasure in it. And then after a while, it really started to grate on me for different reasons. But I’m curious about your experience of being the first. What was that like for you?

Barbara Brandon-Croft: You know, I hear you, because it is complicated. I liked the idea of being the first. It’s something about your place in history, I guess. And I like history. And that’s something that can’t be taken away from you because you’re the first one, so there you are. I did a strip early on about how it’s exciting but upsetting. It’s like a double-edged sword because she goes through all these things about it being so great and so bad that in this day and age, I’m the first black person to do this. And I actually reran that strip ten years later, and it still worked.

And I found, going back to my dad’s stuff, I saw that he did an early Luther that did the same thing—being the first black something, about how good and bad that is. And I was like, wow, me and my dad talking about the same thing so many years apart. That happens a lot.

But to your point about my feeling about being the first, I did feel that complicated way of good and bad, happy and ashamed, that this was the case. But on top of that, I felt like being the first black woman to be in the mainstream press as a cartoonist, I kind of felt like I broke down the door and then I stood in the doorway. Because there I was. And they weren’t about to take another black woman cartoonist. “We already have Barbara.” And you feel like, wow—it’s not all good. It kind of stinks, you know?

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Barbara Brandon-Croft was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. After debuting her comic strip Where I’m Coming From in the Detroit Free Press in 1989, Brandon-Croft became the first Black woman cartoonist to be published nationally by a major syndicate. During its 15 year run, Where I’m Coming From appeared in over 65 newspapers across the USA and Canada, as well as Jamaica, South Africa, and Barbados. Her comics are in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. Brandon-Croft lives in Queens.

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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Writer and organizer Sarah Thankam Mathews (All This Could Be Different) joins guest host Mira Jacob to discuss a brush with mortality in a rip-tide off the California coast, discovering “the sourdough starter of ego death,” and the problems of being an artist under capitalism.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

Big Sur, California • “How to Escape a Rip Current” • What It Is by Lynda Barry • I May Destroy You • Michaela Coel’s Emmy acceptance speech (video, transcript)

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From the conversation:

Sarah Thankam Mathews: I think it was really useful for me to be in this place of having cast aside some degree of ego. I genuinely feel like the person I was at the time I was entering the waves in Big Sur, at the time I was like, I’m going to write a big-dick immigration novel about a queer, Malayali American, Washington D.C. power broker. And I think that version of me had sort of died actually, and I had become not a completely different person, but someone who was meaningfully, differently motivated in the kinds of things I cared the most about and the ways in which I wanted to use my art making.

When I thought about the waves this time around, they came as visual and vivid memory again and again, but in a warmer, friendlier way. When I was writing—and particularly when I was writing in the most intense stretch of writing the book, where I was working on it every single day, just cranking it out as much as I could—I would remember the feeling of being in the waves, but the memory was less encoded as helplessness and fear and more the sense of: you’ve done difficult things before, you lived, you lived for a reason. At least tell yourself that. You’re going to write your book. You are going to get to the shoreline.

It was really uninvited meaning-making. I was not trying to think about any of that stuff, but it’s just what came to me. I’m a lot more woo-woo about writing than I was seven years ago. I think there are vaguely mystical things about it sometimes, and I think it’s okay to let that stuff border your work and your process.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States in her late teens. Her work has been published in Best American Short Stories and she is a recipient of fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2020, she founded the mutual aid group Bed-Stuy Strong. All This Could Be Different, Mathews’ debut novel, was named an NYT Editor’s Choice, chosen for multiple high-profile Best of 2022 lists, and shortlisted for the National Book Award.

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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In this episode, poet Layli Long Soldier (Whereas) joins guest host Mira Jacob to talk about her transformation during pregnancy, learning to open up to the possibilities of the world, and how she makes a space for ease in order to make a space for creativity.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

The Indigenous Language Institute • The Real Housewives • S.J. Res 14 (111th Congress)

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From the conversation:

Layli Long Soldier: I’ll step back a little bit with my relationship to language, which actually has been a lifelong thing, in addition to sound. One of the funny things about my mom is growing up, I attribute this to her, her way of creating conversation and having fun. She liked to read a lot and she would sit and say, what do you think the difference is between overcast and cloudy?

It was often philosophical kind of considerations. And so she would sit there and, in all earnestness, ask other people what they thought the difference was between certain words or what certain words meant and the layers. That was fun for her, or interesting. And so I grew up, without realizing it, thinking in that way. So that’s one thing.

And the other thing is, before I started my studies in undergrad, I worked at the Indigenous Language Institute for 11 years. I was the assistant to the executive director, so we worked with different communities who are working to create language programs to keep their native languages healthy. So that was also a big part of my life and my way of thinking about language and engaging and interacting.

I had a real interest in language and thinking about particulars and so on, but poetry is a whole other thing. It took me a long time to sort of chisel through something in myself, and it’s scarier to get to that place of I would say creative liberation. I try to share this with my students: I really do feel, because of my experience, that creativity is a skill. I think there is a false belief we have that it’s always there, or that it’s something we associate with children, imagination and creativity. And so we take it for granted. You know, children have it, we always have it, we have it within us all the time.

Mira Jacob: Right. Like a spice on the shelf that you could pull down and use at any point.

Layli Long Soldier: Right. And from my experience, it is a skill when we get older, a way of tapping into something within ourselves. But it is, as they say, a practice. You have to learn the ways to access it and to you use it and to keep it vibrant and keep it alive. And so it took me four years of undergrad to actually reach that place of liberation creatively.

And then all of a sudden, in my last semester of undergrad—I often picture it like driving a car. When you’re learning to drive, you’re very self-conscious and you’re pressing on the brake and you’re doing the gears and you’re looking in the mirror and everything is so conscious and deliberate. And then at some point, it becomes a little bit integrated and you begin to do it all at once and not think too hard. And that’s what I had to do, was get to a place of not over-thinking.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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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In this episode, comedian Hari Kondabolu joins Mira to talk about seeing space for himself on the screen, discovering an answer to the question of how to be in the world, the first joke he was really proud of, and the power that comes from alienating an audience on purpose.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

People Magazine‘s Sexiest Man Alive in 1992: Nick Nolte • Apu • Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal • Hari’s “diamond” joke • Race by Paul Mooney • Stewart Lee

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From the conversation:

Hari Kondabolu: I decide to do standup in high school. I go start doing it in college. There were open mics and things; there were no comedy clubs so there were no other places to go. I was the only show in town. And I liked it. I was at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I’m a Queen’s kid in Maine. I stood out like a sore thumb. Not even a sore thumb, just a brown thumb. I didn’t need to be sore. It was just that, that’s a perfectly fine thumb, but it’s a different pigment.

Why is that thumb that color? That was shocking, coming from Queens, to be in a place with so much wealth and so much whiteness, and a type of whiteness I’d never really seen. You know, kind of a WASPy, New England prep school/boarding school whiteness with a different set of standards I didn’t understand.

Mira Jacob: Just to ask again, because I am so curious about that, how does that make your body move through the world?

Hari Kondabolu: Very aware of my skin in a way that I’d never felt before. Very aware of how others perceived me in a way that I’d never felt before.

Mira Jacob: Can I ask the weirdest question? I sometimes feel like it boils down to this for me, and I don’t know if it does for you: did it make you feel bigger or smaller in rooms?

Hari Kondabolu: Both. It depended on the context. If I was at a party, it made me feel really small. It made me feel like nobody was interested. I wasn’t seen as attractive. When I’d be asked where I’m from, then I felt way too big in the room because then all of a sudden it’s like, okay, I do stand out, I am somebody people are aware of. The thing is, it was never where are you from and a follow up about anything other than that. That’s always the thing people have to understand about that question: if that’s not either a starting point to something that isn’t about just your experiences in India or Indian culture….

First of all, it being the first question to me is strange, because when you meet people and you try to be friends with people, you look for things you have in common generally, right? Things that you find interesting about them, but that you also find like, oh, there’s something here that I see in myself that makes me feel comfortable. And so to start with difference and then move away from there and feel like, okay, I’ve got what I needed, is so transactional in a way. It’s like, “I got what I needed, let me move on.” There’s no way you feel like more than an exhibit at that point.

Mira Jacob: Yeah, and I feel like it directly translates to “why are you here?”

Hari Kondabolu: “You don’t make sense in this context.”

Mira Jacob: Exactly.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Hari Kondabolu is a comedian, writer, and podcaster based in Brooklyn, NY. He currently co-hosts the Netflix food competition show Snack vs. Chef with Megan Stalter. His 2018 Netflix special Warn Your Relatives was named one of the best of the year by Time, Paste Magazine, Cosmopolitan, E! Online, and Mashable. In 2017, his truTV documentary The Problem with Apu was released and created a global conversation about race and representation, and is now used in high school, college and grad school curriculums around the country. Hari has also released two comedy albums, Waiting for 2042 & Mainstream American Comic. Additionally, he has performed on Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with David Letterman and among many others. He is also a former writer and correspondent on the much loved, Chris Rock produced FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. He’s a regular panelist on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me and a regular guest-host on Midday on WNYC. As a podcaster, he co-hosted the popular Politically Reactive with W. Kamau Bell. Additionally, he also co-hosts what he politely describes as a “pop up podcast,” The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Podcast with his younger brother Ashok (“Dap” from HBO’s Chillin’ Island and rap group Das Racist.) Hari attended both Bowdoin College and Wesleyan University and earned a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics in 2008.

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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In this episode, guest host Mira Jacob chats with novelist Angie Cruz (How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water) about figuring out who you want to be, Angie’s semi-secret history in fashion design and painting, the arrival of her character Cara Romero in her life, and questioning the truths of America in these most trying of times.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) • Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin • Just Above My Head by James Baldwin • Jazz by Toni Morrison • Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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From the conversation:

Angie Cruz: One thing that has been true about my practice is that when I start giving up on the work or get frustrated or I guess what people call writer’s block, I usually turn to something else. When it was Soledad, I was painting a lot. A lot of people don’t know this, but I painted for pretty much up until my thirties, pretty much every day. I was painting and drawing not with a goal, just for pleasure.

And with Soledad, I remember working on the book, and when I would get frustrated with it, I would just start painting, and then the writing would get jealous. It would get incredibly jealous! It would be like, Why are you ignoring me? And I think that’s what was going on in that moment. I think something like that where I was like, I’m going to quit. And it’s something inside of me where the writing is like, no, you’re not going to quit! I’m showing up for you.

This divine intervention happened with Cara Romero, and I had to create rules for myself because I actually felt like part of my frustration with writing is that I couldn’t find inspiration. I was full of despair. I truly can’t remember a moment where I felt more at a loss than that particular moment where Trump was president.

And now, in retrospect, I realize the bullying reminded me a lot of trauma that I experienced as a child at home. And I gave myself a constraint: I said, I will only listen to Cara Romero when I’m commuting—either on a train, a bus, or a plane. And I always worked on it on my phone for the first drafts. It was like a game—some people play Wordle, I was playing the game with Cara Romero.

Mira Jacob: That’s amazing! But it only works when you’re in transit?

Angie Cruz: Well, I made that constraint because I figured if I didn’t put any pressure on myself at all, then it would be fun again. Because the truth is that writing wasn’t fun anymore. I felt kind of beaten down by the feedback I was getting for Dominicana, and also beaten down by the feedback I was getting about what it means to be an immigrant in the United States. I felt like, will we ever be treated well here in the United States? Those images of kids on the border…. I was very afraid for many people that I love. We were questioning was it citizenship.

At the same time, there was a lot of things going on in Dominican Republic, and they continue to happen on the Haitian-Dominican border, where Haitians are and were in dramatic numbers being deported and their citizenships were being stripped.

All of that combined just made me feel very scared. So I had to find a way to have fun with the work and believe that storytelling still matters to me, even if it didn’t matter to anybody else. In the same way that my grandmother—my grandmother spinning stories in her kitchen? She’s not trying to get published. But those stories, you know, they’re pretty good.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). Her novel, Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee and the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including the Lighthouse Fellowship, Siena Art Institute, and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Fellowship. She’s published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and other journals. She’s the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix) and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York and Turin.

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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In this episode, guest-host Mira Jacob talks with astrologer and author Chani Nicholas about being the child at the party, how Chani found her voice, and the question of who heals the healers.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

Morning Pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way) • FreeFrom • Therapy

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From the conversation:

Chani Nicholas: I have a really hard time being anything but who I am. That’s a very fortunate and very unfortunate quality about me. If I’m going to do anything, I’m going to be really honest about it. When I started writing, it was because I saw things in the world that were reflected in the astrology, and I’ve always been a person that’s really interested in the world and also in injustice.

And because I grew up in the way that I did, where no one wanted to see the truth, my whole being is bent towards “But look at this thing! This is where the suffering is. Why don’t we look here and solve it?” It’s my way of being in the world, because I was trying to deal with my own trauma.

There are a lot of similarities between growing up in a family system, which most of us do, that you’re like, oh my god, I can’t believe the whole family is ignoring this thing. And looking at the larger system and how brutal it is and saying, how do we live like this? We could fix this.

And that frustration I had—and a lot of us have as kids—is we grow up and we’re like, okay, I’m going to try to do something about this. That was how I got into writing. I was like, well, my lens is astrology, but I’m looking at all this other stuff and they match in this really specific way that I found interesting. I think it was just always part of my own therapeutic process—to talk about what is not working and what could be.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Chani Nicholas is a Los Angeles–based New York Times bestselling author of You Were Born For This and astrologer with a community of over one million monthly readers. She has been a counseling astrologer for more than twenty years, guiding people to discover and live out their life’s purpose through understanding their birth chart. Her app, CHANI, offers users a personalized, daily understanding of their birth chart. She has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and on Netflix.

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.

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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In this episode, Hafizah Augustus Geter (The Black Period) joins Jordan to discuss her family’s influence on her work, the power of memory, being in conversation with the writers you love, and how all of us live in a mix of genres.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

Goya’s Black Paintings • “Fighting Erasure” by Parul Sehgal • Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory • Fela Kuti, Yussef Lateef, Otis Redding

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From the conversation:

Hafizah Geter: For me, writing has always been the only door. It’s the only thing I’ve been good at and the only thing I’ve been inclined to always want to do. I think you do what you feel called to, and writing has always felt like my life’s purpose. And by having a father who’s an artist, I saw what it meant to live your life’s purpose, and that it wasn’t easy. It required courage. But you just had to do it. And whatever you’re doing had to be helping people. And so for me, there was never another path but this one, in writing.

In terms of how I came to that, it wasn’t until I was in it that I even recognized what I was doing. I think one of the best things we can do as writers is kind of lean on each other. There’s always that saying that writing is a solitary process, but it never really feels like that to me, because whether it’s in my mind or on the page, I’m in conversation with other writers I love.

One of the things that’s helped me get through this was I had a draft of the book done, but it was still not yet what it was going to be, and I could sense that. And I needed something to do. I needed a way through it. And so I intentionally was like, let me go find what other writers are doing.

And so I went in search of a question I could answer. And for me, that question became a question that I borrowed from a book critic, Parul Sehgal, where she asks, what would it look like to emerge from erasure? It’s a question that I loved because it wasn’t “what does it mean to emerge from erasure,” it was “what does it look like?” It literally demanded an action plan. And wasn’t this the question that I was asking throughout this? Like, how do I come back into a shape, into a form?

And so I thought, okay, what if, instead of navigating this question inside of myself, I do this on the page? And what if I actually try to answer it? And I think I come to that answer through another writer: Toni Morrison’s idea of re-memory, which is essentially taking your past and writing the narrative that you need that you can survive in. And that’s kind of what I do.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American, an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, The Believer, The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.