Miriam Toews Pushes Against Silences

This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places. Thresholds is a co-production between Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub

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“I think I need to resign myself to the fact that I need to write. Even if I’m a grandmother, and it probably comes from my religious upbringing, which was traditional, my idea of wanting be this grandmother in a rocking chair with all my grandchildren playing and just being content with that and just observing life… But of course I’m not. I have this need to take all this stuff —all the thoughts and feelings and observations, everything that’s heard and seen— and SHAPE it into something. For what? Why? It seems…odd.” — Miriam Toews

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Miriam Toews is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one prior work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Several of her novels have been made into feature films, including All My Puny Sorrows and the Oscar-nominated Women Talking. Miriam Toews lives in Toronto.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud.