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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Jordan sits down with Renee Gladman to talk about prose architecture, Henry James, her fascination with cities, and mushrooms. “I did figure out how to make my own sentences get long and twisty and spiraly and I figured that out through drawing, which blows my mind. To go back into writing and find that now I know how to go up and out and back in language, where I couldn’t figure out how to do that before. That feels amazing.”
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Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction.
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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud.
