Thresholds

Jordan talks to the incomparable Rita Dove about discovery, about taking a break from creating and publishing, and about re-learning to hold a pen again after her MS diagnosis.Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award–shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974–2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe!--------------------------------This episode is presented in collaboration with the 2021 Miami Book Fair. Rita Dove is just one of the many writers from around the world participating in the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. This year's Miami Book Fair takes place online and in person from November 14th to November 21st. Please visit miamibookfair.com for more information, or follow MBF at @miamibookfair Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sanaë Lemoine tells Jordan about the moment she learned her father had a second family and the ways that that reveal changed her life, her family, her relationship to secrets -- and helped inspire The Margot Affair.Sanaë Lemoine was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA at Columbia University. She now lives in New York.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to Andrew Martin about a trip to Montana in the midst of a tumultuous year, putting on a persona for writing, and how the two combined to change the way he tells stories.Andrew Martin's most recent book is a story collection entitled Cool for America. His first novel Early Work was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He lives in New York with his partner, Laura, and their dog Bonnie.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan chats with writer and critic Rebecca Carroll about the tricky nature of writing memoir, being the mother of a Black son, and about the power of being the one to tell the story.Rebecca Carroll is a writer, creative consultant, editor-at-large, and host of the podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 Essential Conversations about Race in a Pivotal Year for America (WNYC Studios). Most recently, she was a cultural critic at WNYC, and a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has been published widely, and she’s the author of several books about race in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America. Her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze (Simon & Schuster, Feb 2021), has been optioned by MGM Studios and Killer Films with Rebecca attached to adapt for TV.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to Maggie Nelson about hope, about hitting one's threshold, and about trying to respond to current events in On Freedom without dating the text.Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently On Freedom. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.Want more Thresholds? Visit www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to author Alexandra Kleeman about the threshold of the natural and the man-made, about how we are and will continue to consistently cross that threshold back and forth, and about how cognitive science influenced her new book.Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Something New Under the Sun as well as Intimations: Stories and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Born in 1986 in Berkeley, California, she was raised in Colorado and lives in Staten Island with her husband, the writer Alex Gilvarry. She is an Assistant Professor at the New School.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to journalist Lauren Sandler about how close you can or should get to your subjects, about who gets to write what and why, and about the driving forces behind the stories that intrigue her.Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her most recent book is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home (named a Notable Book of 2020 by The New York Times) and she's the author of two previous books -- One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.  Lauren's essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle. She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk. She has led the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. Lauren is a member of NationSwell Council. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a Mid-Atlantic Fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and a Brown Foundation resident at the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to writer Eula Biss about living in the moment of a threshold, about buying a house, about making a career, and about how too much fertile ground for thought can lead to overload.Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2009. Her work has recently appeared in the Guardian, the Paris Review, Freeman’s, The Believer, and The New Yorker.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.Try MUBI for 30 Days at MUBI.com/Thresholds.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com -- and be sure to rate/review/subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks to Deesha Philyaw about getting out of a bad marriage, learning to embrace life again, and doing it all while putting together a short story collection.Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to subscribe and review! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan visits with poet Mary Ruefle at her home in Vermont for a conversation about the passage of time, the both-sides-ness of thresholds, memory -- and the best way to cook an egg.Mary Ruefle is the author Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize and the 2019 LA Times Book Prize and was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award and the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She's also written many other books including My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.comBe sure to subscribe and leave us a review! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.