New Yorker Jen Epstein is a writer, activist, and worker bee raised by two mental health professionals. She holds a BA in communication arts and an MA in media studies. She currently works as a Media Logistics Operations Project Manager for Discovery Communications, and her new book, Don’t Get Too Excited: It’s Just About a Pair of Shoes and Other Laments from My Life, finds her using self-deprecating humor to expose her inner demons with stories that are sometimes heartbreaking and always deeply personal.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Epstein about her new book, using humor to rationalize and normalize mental illness, racism in America, COVID-19, and much more!
I look down at my mug. I don’t know why she wanted to see me. I don’t see any sand on her shoes. Somehow we started arguing about themes. Her eyes green-blue, a brew of pine needles and lake water. This woman who was never my teacher.
I ask her how her summer is going. She is occupied with travel and poetry. Taking some beach time and riding her bike. Just mind the barometer. You can’t reduce a poem to slicing baloney, her hand slapping the table. A glass sheet separating vintage theater tickets from her palm.
I’m thinking of writing about levitating desks and helium breath. Myths where clay people use heat to mold faces. My summer isn’t going well. I wanted a rain of sunflower petals.…
When asked about their favorite Pink Floyd album, rural Americans, the religious right, and most CEOs respond quickly with The Wall. The rest of us ask, “Why are you asking us that?” and get no answer.
Good fences make good neighbors. A wall is bigger than a fence. Would a wall, then, create even better neighbors? Good question, I think.
What else should we ask? If we don’t ask, we’ll just get told.
Let’s see. There’s the Berlin wall, but that one got torn down. The walls of Jericho – there was something going on there… Anyone remember? Mention them anyway. It sounds good regardless.
How funny that something like a wall, the posterchild of practicality, can become instead the symbolic child everyone fights over for custody.…
Thin Places: Essays from the In Between by Jordan Kisner
On the edge, where Columbus and Chicago Avenues meet in Minneapolis, a familiar sign is plunged past concrete, into layers of soil. The background is a deep red, like blood. The letters on the sign are white and centered. Stop, it said, and cars and bikes and pedestrians did. When I came near the sign, I noticed it was different. Stop, it said. Yet, underneath this word a sheet of white typing paper was attached at its edges with electric tape. On the paper were the words, …killing us. A block over from where I stood, George Floyd was murdered by a policeman just days before. The officer’s knee rested on George’s neck, even as George cried, “I can’t breathe,” and the crowd pleaded with the office to stop, to no avail.…
Time means something different to me now. It used to symbolize hope, an opportunity to try something new and perhaps, waiting for something joyous to begin. But now, it’s just a burden, a reminder that everything under the hands of time and everything within it must die. But waiting to die; that’s something else entirely. The flowers on the kitchen table are wilting now. Their red petals are drooping towards the ground as if they too are crying, only to lap up their tears in the vase in which they dwell. I haven’t paid too much attention to the flowers before now, but here we are, and here I am, having my evening tea, only to be staring at something I never thought of as living.…
