Standing on the Threshold
How in-betweenness shapes both life and story
What happens in the moments between?
Between one life stage and the next. Between certainty and uncertainty. Between arrival and departure. Between the person we were and the person we are becoming.
Anthropologists call these spaces liminal. Writers often recognize them instinctively. They are thresholds, crossings, moments of transition.
Joni Sensel has spent much of her life exploring those in-between spaces.
Joni knows the creative impulse as something that gives us a direct connection to the Divine. Her memoir, Feeling Fate tells her story of finding her soulmate and then being “told” he would die an early death—how she held this premonition, savoring their time together while carrying an uncertain, anticipatory grief.
Joni is “a writer, adventurer, and creativity advocate who leans hard on creativity’s painkilling power.” Her books range from novels to picture books to memoir to creativity guide. Her book Wildly Inspired: Tap the Creative Power of Nature just won a Nautilus Award.
Perhaps it is because of an acquaintance with death that Joni dives deeply into life, including the liminal—the in-between spaces where things are in transit. In conversation with her a few months back, I asked her what gave her the courage to write the memoir and she told me about a middle-of-the night “vision” she had experienced many years before, which forever altered her understanding of life and death. As she begins to talk in the excerpt here, she is asking the vision “Who are you?”
(Video may be best listened to with earbuds or headphones.)
So how can liminality or “in-betweenness” help our writing? Well, liminality is not limited to the spiritual plane. It can be a place or time of passage, of standing on the threshold. Something we or our characters may not even notice unless we pause. In fiction we, the author may be aware of this passage when our character is not. And thinking in terms of liminality can transform the way we think about setting.
Joni will be faculty on this year’s Full-Bodied Writing Retreat—an entire weekend of exploring setting while staying on the lush grounds of Sacred Waters Retreat Center in the Pacific Northwest.
And tomorrow, Wednesday, June 10 at 7:00 Pacific Time, Joni has agreed to offer us a free webinar called “Liminality: ‘How In-Betweenness’ Can Supercharge Your Settings.”
Please join us! This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from Joni, and we’d love to meet you.