““I was fairly clear on the fact that I was never going to make money off my writing… The upside of that was that my writing was all play, for me.”

“I thought: This is the kind of life I want. I want adventures. I want the super blue sky. I want to feel free.”

“I didn’t know such a thing existed, and here I am in it. Although at that time I didn’t see it that way; I just simply walked around every day exploding, just exploding, with everything I was seeing and experiencing.”

“How do I live with this complexity? And with the reality that there are some things that I might never know?”

“The problem was we couldn’t talk about the ways in which our anger was actually deeply interrelated and in sympathy in certain ways. And why would that be?”

“That’s my instinct— to not finish a project. I’ll start it with high hopes and lots of ideas and then if I don’t have velocity on my side, I myself undergo too many changes.”

“Even the most skeptical writers talk about process by using language like “the hours just flew by,” or “such and such phrase just came to me.” They’ll mine the language of the supernatural to talk about what’s happening.”

“I’m never going to feel confident that I’m making the right choice or that I’m the right person to tell a story or that I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself. You just have to work in spite of that.”

“My poems arrive at these moments and because they arrive at these moments I realize I have to live like the poems. I want to live like the work I’m making.”

“The text is the most successful embodiment. That is where I have succeeded. That text could not have happened if I didn’t go on this search, and if I wasn’t present in all that vulnerability.”

“I decided I wanted to teach a class on Asian American fiction. I did not have the typical experience of my parents being immigrants, or their parents being immigrants. But I thought, well why can’t I teach this? As an adoptee, this is part of the Asian American experience.”

My house had never been cleaner. I was like “I’m going to weedwack!” I’ve never weedwacked anything in my life.

“I crossed into a space where my life was no longer defined by my parents and what they needed from me. And that gave me time and space to begin this journey of figuring out what I needed.”

“I don’t know if I could have written it in a way that wasn’t absurd, because absurdity felt like the most natural and truthful way of being.”

“After I gained citizenship, it was just this constant vibrational confusion that I held within me about, what do I claim as my culture? Who do I claim affinity to? How can I ever reconcile these questions?”

“Your life is not just a series of present tenses ordered as integers in a great scroll. Everything behind you in the scroll is part of your present tense, and you don’t want to forsake it. You want to honor all of it.”

“Most of the things that take me to writing are things I don’t talk about publicly or things I don’t share publicly. I need to keep those as my own, I need to keep those close to me so that I might still feel good about them.”

“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.