David Given Schwarm

An anthropologist named Victor Turnere added a new wrinkle to the disciplines canon in the 1950’s when he wrote about the importance of something called limen. Translating roughly as “threshold,” limen refers to those times like adolescence when we’re caught between two life phases. In these neither-here-nor-there periods, he wrote, levels of energy and disorder both run high.

You’re in a period of limen right now, novelist, and this week I recommend you heighten the energetic state by taking a writing field trip to a space such as an airport, hotel lobby, bus depot, or anywhere people are temporarily lodged in that fascinating space between departure and arrival.