“When I ended up at the prison because of my novel… You start to ask yourself. Is it worth it? I mean writing. Is it worth it? To be here, in prison, for a year or more?”

“Not only knowing their names but getting them right is a duty toward every living thing on this planet. Have the decency to know what’s around you.”

We flipped the script! Lydia Millet interviews Jordan Kisner about waiting, chameleons, and thresholds to celebrate the paperback release of Thin Places.

“Why am I trying to be a part of a canon that literally does not even understand me?”

“That’s when I realized, “Oh this is the project of the book. I’m remaking my consciousness. This isn’t what I signed up for.” And of course it is— I’m the one holding the clipboard. But this is not what I thought it was going to be.”

“Injury doesn’t always show up the way you think it will. Family doesn’t manifest or show up the way you think it will— in my life, it hasn’t.”

“I think that writers could feel much less lonely in what is already a fairly lonely vocation, if there were more conversations about this.”

“Life is lived on the ground, and mostly it doesn’t make sense, and mostly it’s messy, and mostly it’s mundane. I want to hold something of life inside of the things that I make.”

“I think it has helped to talk about these things. To— to make peace with it. To make amends with it.”

“It’s not that I don’t ever write harshly now, or ever use humor. But I always want first to love something— in the world and in my work. I wish first to love something.”

“I realized, Oh, I would do anything to get out of sadness. Whether it be turning to rage, or turning to paranoia, or anything else. Any kind of distraction.”

“The beginning of my illness felt less like a single moment of bifurcation than a series of small fractures.”

“My first thought was, NO. I thought, I don’t like this idea of “a threshold.” I realized it’s just like because on some level I feel like I’m a very resistant personality.”

“I thought “She’ll be SO ANGRY that she died!” Dare I borrow some of her mannerisms?”

“I don’t think books are stable objects, because I don’t think your brain is a stable object.”

“We would always go to see the body, and my mother would say ‘Ugh, she doesn’t look like herself.’”

There was a lot of dancing to get through that time. I was thinking about this last night… Why do all this if you can’t go sing and dance with your friends?”

“Anxiety, I think, is ecstatic. Being pushed to the limit. There have been times when I know my body can’t go anymore— and yet it is?”

“There was no other place I could go for healing or the sort of answers I was looking for than my first home.”

“I didn’t want to speak in a way that was operatic, I wanted to have a conversation. I wanted to talk instead of sing.”