Thresholds

Jordan talks with N. Scott Momaday about the Stanford fellowship that changed his life, the importance of taking the natural world into your heart, and the genius of Emily Dickinson.

MENTIONED:

The Stanford Creative Writing Fellowship (now the Stegner Fellowship)

"My Cricket" by Emily Dickinson

The Pueblo of Jemez

N. Scott Momaday is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller whose works celebrate and preserve Native American heritage. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 2021 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. He lives in New Mexico and his latest book is Dream Drawings.

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Lulu Miller joins Jordan to talk about heartbreak and building back from it, about making writing the healthy choice, about relating to David Starr Jordan -- and a little bit about fish.

MENTIONED:

Radiolab

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Lisa Frank

Lulu Miller is the cohost of Radiolab, cofounder of NPR’s Invisibilia, and a Peabody Award–winning science journalist. Her first book is Why Fish Don't Exist and her writing has been published in The New Yorker, VQR, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and beyond. Her favorite spot on earth is Humpback Rocks.

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adrienne maree brown joins Jordan to talk about the moment she learned what her style of leadership looked like, about the power of saying things aloud, and about her love of Octavia Butler and finding her way to writing fiction.

MENTIONED:

The League of Young Voters (or The League of Pissed-Off Voters)

AK Press

Left Turn Magazine's 2010 issue "Other Worlds are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Culture, and Organizing" edited by Walidah Imarisha

Octavia E. Butler's archive at the Huntington Library in Pasadena

adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

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Allegra Hyde talks to Jordan about the peripatetic experience she had trying to find herself in utopian communities after college -- and a transformative near-miss with a mushroom that led her to where she is now.

MENTIONED:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• the Rainbow Valley Community in New Zealand
• Brook Farm
• Important Saftey Tip: never eat a raw mushroom or one you haven't safely identified as non-poisonous. We recommend this handy NYT guide on "How to Forage Mushrooms" as a place to start for the aspiring forager.

Allegra Hyde is the author of ELEUTHERIA, as well as the short story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Hyde's writing has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other venues. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.

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Ed Yong joins Jordan to tell the story of his pandemic puppy, Typo, and how introducing a new animal to his household deepened his understanding of the book he was working on. Plus, what it's like to take a break from covering the pandemic to write an entire book.

MENTIONED:

Our Dogs, Ourselves by Alexandra Horowitz

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021

OUR PLANET (Netflix)

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His next book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is out in June 2022. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Liz Neeley, and their corgi, Typo.

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It’s the end of our ‘experimentation’ capsule of episodes and Jordan is joined in the studio by Thresholds producer Drew Broussard for a grab-bag of outtakes, audience questions, and more.

MENTIONED:

• Sheila Heti asks Jordan a question she’s never been asked before
• Alexander Chee recommends some books, music, and more to get a person through stressful times
• Jordan tells Drew about a poem by Jericho Brown that knocked her over
• Advice for what to do when the writing gets hard

We'll be back March 23rd!

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Sheila Heti joins Jordan to talk about grief, god, the shape of her novel, and what it means to be rooting for the snail.

Mentioned:

• "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac
• The Masterpiece by Émile Zola
• Sarah Ruhl
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “the New Vanguard” by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a Best Book of 2018. Her novels have been translated into twenty-four languages. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Jordan talks to Dr. Carl Erik Fisher (The Urge: Our History of Addiction) about perceiving addiction as a spectrum, the historical evolution of addiction as a concept, and the psychotic break that led to his own sobriety.

Mentioned:

Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England by Rebecca Lemon

The Faust legend

The American temperance movement

Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate by Walt Whitman

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son

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Sarah Manguso talks to Jordan about thinking she'd never write a novel, processing the place you come from, and the cold silence of whiteness.

Mentioned:

* the four-minute mile

* Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Wallace Stevens

* Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth

* "A Boston Toast" by John Collins Bossidy

Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most recently the novel Very Cold People. Her nonfiction books are 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, and her poetry collections are Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Born and raised in Massachusetts, she now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at Antioch University.

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Jordan talks with Kiese Laymon about fear, loving an enemy, trying not to write wack-ass shit, and what it was like to buy back the rights to his first books in order to have them revised and republished.

Mentioned:

"How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" at Gawker

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

"Come and Get Me" -- Jay-Z

Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize lecture

Jesmyn Ward

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on several new projects, including the long poem Good God, the horror comedy And So On, the children’s book City Summer, Country Summer, and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

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