Thin Places: Essays from In Between
By Jordan Kisner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

The debut collection by Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays from In Between, explores the idea of liminality and considers how “certain inviolable boundaries” can “collide and reveal something.” The author explains that the idea of so-called “thin places” comes from Celtic folklore: that “the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and become porous.” What we normally cannot see—God, our dead loved ones, or even music—might suddenly become visible or at least become easier to approach. “Distinctions between you and not you, real and unreal, worldly and otherworldly fall away,” writes Kisner. In other words, thin places are locations where “you might poke a hole through to another reality.”

The essays in Thin Places are at once journalistic, philosophical, and personal. They range from the story of young Christian evangelicals who do mission work in beachfront bars to an account of doctors who treat obsessive-compulsive disorder with experimental brain surgery. As the diversity of topics suggests, although Kisner’s consideration of thin places is partially shaped by her own Christian background, she uses the word in a more secular sense to mean any place where ideas considered to be opposites collide. What these collisions reveal, she says, is always sacred, even if just metaphorically. When you find yourself in one of these thin places, she says, it becomes clear that “reality is not what you thought it was.” A new perspective on the world can then emerge.

Some of Kisner’s essays are stronger than others. One of the most powerful is “Habitus,” an investigation of elaborate pageants staged in honor of George Washington in Laredo, TX near the border between the United States and Mexico. Young girls outfit themselves in period-appropriate gowns (covered with beads and weighing up to one hundred pounds each) and march in a patriotic parade. Kisner’s essay points to many moments of thin-place collisions. Nineteenth-century white residents, a minority of the area’s population in the newly annexed region, initially felt the need to proclaim their Americanness in this contested space. The traditional celebration expanded over the years to include the pageant, which now features girls descended both from white settlers and from Mexican Americans, all dressing in colonial garb to celebrate the founding fathers. Kisner uses this fascinating event to explore such topics as the continuing effects of colonialism, the process of assimilation, the workings of respectability politics, and the performative nature of gender. She also considers how her own experiences fall into their own borderlands: her mother’s Mexican American heritage mixed with her father’s WASP culture, her bisexuality, and her complicated and changing relationship to faith. These ideas are integrated into a wildly layered essay which successfully demonstrates how, as Kisner writes, such liminal experiences can illustrate “both brokenness and the possibility of making something radically new.”

The final essay in Thin Places, “Backward Miracle,” is just as thoughtful and lyrical as “Habitus,” but is not nearly as unified or well argued. Kisner suggests that we live in our own embodiment of a thin place--our skin--all the time. She begins the essay with an account of accidentally cutting herself while slicing open an avocado, thus requiring her body to heal the wound “from the inside out and from the edges inward.” She then moves on to a brief discussion of the history of tattoos. Next, we get details about the author’s first romantic relationship with another woman after she had assumed herself to be straight. The essay shifts again to the story of Olive Oatman, a mid-nineteenth-century young white woman raised in a Mohave community, where she received traditional facial tattoos designed to show spiritual belonging and assure that ancestors would recognize community members in the afterlife. When white people later saw Olive’s facial markings, they believed she was tottering on the border between savage and civilized. Kisner shows that the acquisition of tattoos can be “moments where the self breaks open and becomes some other self.” The author returns to her own recognition of her bisexuality, stating that she wasn’t ready for the “experience of radical change” and “disorienting liminality” that she felt when her friends and family looked at her as if she were a stranger. Like Olive, she had to learn to live in the borderlands of identity. Eventually, Kisner decided to get a tattoo herself: three dots in a line on her wrist, which she explains was “a code only I could read: no matter what new world I landed in wherever or whatever or whoever that might be, I would be recognizable to myself.” A tighter storyline could have made this essay into a stunning piece of writing.

Kisner’s essays illustrate that binary oppositions can often turn into meaningful unity. Wherever we see two completely separate worlds, we create true wholeness by breaching the gap.

—Hannah Joyner is an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.