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. 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. 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. 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. Kisner’s essay points to many moments of thin-place collisions. 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. 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.

Some of Kisner’s essays are stronger than others. 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. What these collisions reveal, she says, is always sacred, even if just metaphorically. 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.

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. The essays in Thin Places are at once journalistic, philosophical, and personal. In other words, thin places are locations where “you might poke a hole through to another reality.”

“Distinctions between you and not you, real and unreal, worldly and otherworldly fall away,” writes Kisner. 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.

Jordan kisner