Thresholds

It's the end of our 'ghosts' capsule and not a moment too soon! Those days sure are getting shorter...

FEATURED:

• Patrick Cottrell on his change-of-seasons vibe this year
• A thematically-appropriate clip from our long-ago episode with Lynn Steger Strong (whose new book Flight is out soon! pre-order it!)
• Threshold alum highlights!!
• Scary-season book recommendations from the October Country, courtesy of Drew

See you in a couple weeks!

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Samantha Hunt joins Jordan to talk about The Unwritten Book, what it means to believe in ghosts, grieving the death of her father, and confronting the darkness out there in the woods.

MENTIONED:

• geodesic domes
• slasher movies
• Flash Count Diary by Darcy Steinke
• If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
• One Direction

Samantha Hunt is the author of the non-fiction book The Unwritten Book, the story collection The Dark Dark and the novels Mr. Splitfoot, The Invention of Everything Else, and The Seas. Hunt is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize, and the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and she was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in upstate New York.

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Jordan talks with Ingrid Rojas Contreras (The Man Who Could Move Clouds) about the accident that left her with amnesia, grappling with the decision to write about her family, and the importance of offering healing.

MENTIONED:

• A black Vera Wang gown
• Curanderos
• Topographical disorientation

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her latest book, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

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Jordan talks to Amy Fusselman about writers who perform, getting out of your own head, and the agonies and ecstasies of comedy. It's a laugh-out-loud kind of episode.

MENTIONED:

• McSweeney's Internet Concern
• "Hawk" by Joy Williams
• Second Position

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Mean$, is her first novel.

Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Ms., ARTnews, Artnet, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University.

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Celeste Ng joins Jordan to talk about her new book Our Missing Hearts, motherhood and parenting while writing, and the big questions of what kind of place art can have in the fight against fascism.

MENTIONED:

• The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
• #DontLookAway / #NoKidsInCages
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published in October 2022. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.

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It's the end of a 'Family' capsule of episodes and the last before our summer break, so we really pulled out all the stops this time.

FEATURED:

• an outtake of Crystal Hana Kim talking about her next novel
• a voicemail from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about how she does August
• Threshold alum highlights (like a bunch of them)
• summer reading recommendations from Jordan & Drew

See you in September, with fresh pencils and notebooks and interviews!

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Jordan talks with Michelle Tea about her new memoir (Knocking Myself Up), making the decision to get pregnant, her tarot practice, and creating a queer family.

MENTIONED:

• The Rider-Waite Tarot
• Valencia by Michelle Tea
• XOJane.com
• Buddhism

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia, the essay collection Against Memoir, and the speculative memoir Black Wave. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions. Knocking Myself Up is her latest memoir.

Tea's cultural interventions include brainstorming the international phenomenon Drag Queen Story Hour, co-creating the Sister Spit queer literary performance tours, and occupying the role of Founding Director at RADAR Productions, a Bay Area literary organization, for over a decade. She also helmed the imprints Sister Spit Books at City Lights Publishers, and Amethyst Editions at The Feminist Press. She produces and hosts the Your Magic podcast, wherein which she reads tarot cards for Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Phoebe Bridgers and other artists, as well as the live tarot show Ask the Tarot on Spotify Greenroom.

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Jordan talks with Keith Gessen about his new memoir of fatherhood, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, and the challenges -- and wonders -- of being a parent and a writer, and what he thinks Raffi will think of the book when he's older.

MENTIONED: 

• Raising America by Ann Hulbert
• "Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City" by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• Emily Oster, economics professor and parenting advisor
• The Kazdin Method

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, “All the Sad Young Literary Men” and "A Terrible Country," as well as a book of essays, "Raising Raffi."  Gessen was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in History and Literature in 1998, and subsequently received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Syracuse University. In 2014-2015 he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

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Jordan talks with Crystal Hana Kim (If You Leave Me) about the ultimate unknowability of another person's story, about motherhood as a writer, and about how a friend's validation and encouragement helped her get serious about her craft.

MENTIONED:

• The Korean War
• Post-partum depression
• Reproductive justice
• Ceramics class

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title and named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and is a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. Her second novel, The Stone Home, is forthcoming from William Morrow / HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

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Jordan talks with Lydia Conklin about bucking the conventions of queer storytelling, how a childhood Oregon Trail reenactment led to one of the most memorable stories in Rainbow Rainbow, and the excitement of making big moves in life and art.

MENTIONED:

* The Oregon Trail (play here)

* Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

* Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Lydia Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was published in June 2022 by Catapult in the US and Scribner in the UK.

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