There’s a pocket of the literary world where the name “Lidia Yuknavitch” is spoken in reverent tones, as if invoking a sort of high priestess. You might think I exaggerate; I don’t.
It all started in March 2011 with the publication of her first book, a memoir titled “The Chronology of Water.” Among lovers of the memoir genre, poetry and experimental writing, it became a modern cult classic for its rich language and unique exploration of grief, sexual abuse, addiction — and the myriad other things braided into its hypnotic, form-bending narrative. Now “Chronology” is on track to be the next buzzy indie film as Kristen Stewart makes her directorial debut, having also co-written the screenplay based on Yuknavitch’s memoir.
In the intervening years since “Chronology” first landed, Yuknavitch’s reputation as a boldly innovative author has only expanded: She published the short story collection “Verge” and four novels including “The Small Backs of Children,” “Thrust” and “The Book of Joan,” which inspired this headline from the New York Times: “A Brilliant, Incendiary Joan of Arc Story for a Ravaged Earth.”
Beyond that, Yuknavitch, who calls the Oregon Coast home, has also attracted a dedicated following for her “The Misfit’s Manifesto” – a TED Talk with over 4 million views and counting. In the inspiring presentation, Yuknavitch, wearing a calico dress and Doc Marten’s, sticks up for the eccentrics, the oddballs, and anyone who has ever felt like a screw-up. Also a longtime creative writing instructor, she’s the founder of the Portland-based workshop series Corporeal Writing.
Now, a decade and a half after “Chronology,” she’s back with another memoir, “Reading the Waves.” In many ways, this work feels like picking up the conversation begun in “Chronology” all these years later; themes and stories from the first book ripple through its pages, now considered from vantage points offered by age and experience.
As she writes in the introduction, “I mean to make a series of returns to the people and places that marked me in ways I have carried around in my body most of my life. I believe our bodies are carriers of experiences. I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.”
Now might be the time to reveal that I’m not an objective source on this author and that referring to Lidia by her last name in this article feels weird. I count her among my friends, and we have worked together in years past. I can tell you that in person Lidia is both as unpretentious as an old shoe and yet also electrifyingly intelligent, to the point of nerdy. She’s like that shy girl in class drawing unicorns in her notebook; you don’t think she’s paying attention until she gets called on by the teacher and then says something so observant and unique that it blows everyone away.
Also important to know about her: She’s a mighty swimmer who feels most at home in the water. She’s a tree-hugger, as in she literally hugs trees.
We traded emails recently to talk about “Reading the Waves.” Here’s an edited version of our exchange:
Q. What’s outside your window right now?
Well, there is a tree, so that’s good. A dogwood.
Q. One of the many, many lines that caught me in ‘“Reading the Waves” was, “Instead, I’ve chosen to spend my life creating literature as resistance.” Can you tell me about the meanings that sentence holds for you?
I think, in some ways – and you can tell me if you agree with this or not – all kinds of stories come at us about who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to live our lives. And we may or may not fit those stories. They may help some people and not others. They may injure some people and not others. Stories about identity, or thoughts, or feelings and experience.
The stories that have come my way, the stories I have inherited about daughter, mother, wife, lover, survivor, teacher, writer – I don’t fit well. I’m misfitted. And I’m not alone. So some of us find ourselves creating and sharing stories against the grain of mainstream ideas and narratives meant to collect human experience.
I count myself amongst those whose stories off alternatives, cracks and fissures, possibility threads in the face of family, social, or cultural narratives that hem our hearts in. While that is not the same as resistance against tyranny or violence or war, it is not nothing either. Storytelling is a powerful realm of resistance, revolt, revision, change. Art is a realm capable of endless resistance and transmogrify.
Q. What prompted the return to memoir? Why this, why now?
I suspect two different confluences: One, our times, and the pressure of these times. Attacks on women, on LGBTQ+ folks, on BIPOC. Repression and oppression in every epoch all over the globe breeds artistic expression.
The other rivulet involves aging. Moving through the transformational space of menopause (another word might be “crucible,” ha).
And a third thing I’d say is the act of returning itself drew my attention. Mightily. When we get old enough, we tend to look back differently. So I wanted to ask big questions about returns.
I should note that I asked a salmon first. Seemed logical. She said birth and death swim in the same stream. Once I was writing my way through returns, once I was inside the writing process, narrative illuminates even better questions and ideas.
Q. A salmon? Of course you did. In this book, you pick up threads again and again of experiences and memories and re-enter them from different points. I thought about [Argentinian writer] Jorge Luis Borges, and how he spoke about autobiographical writing as being either an opportunity to look at life in a mirror or through a prism. You always choose the prism.
I thought of Borges, too! Ha! And you are correct. The prism is everything. The mirror doesn’t interest me. Ever. I don’t even look in the mirror when I brush my teeth.
Q. What is gained by writing deeply into our lives?
Well, the thing is, we tend to carry certain stories of ourselves around as if that is the only story of what happened to us. Especially difficult stories. But there are stories underneath those heavy narratives, there are other vantage points, there are the stories in the periphery or blind spot of what happened to us, there are stories that would come to us differently if we went back through memory and asked different questions – for instance, about color or sound, smell or light, or if we simply continued to ask of our memory, “and what is the story underneath that one?” Writing gives us the ability to understand our human experiences as layered and expansive, rather than too heavy, conclusive, done. Writing opens experience up. Writing lets memory breathe, change, die, become again.
Q. One of the threads in the book is about a student in one of your classes who was murdered. How has teaching made an impression on you, shifted you, enlarged you as a writer — and a person? Is it possible to separate writer and person?
Teaching has been the formative experience of my life. And by teaching, I mean sharing collective and collaborative idea space with other humans. The transference and transformation available when people agree to share ideas and stories — even difficult ones — can rearrange your DNA. But I’m not talking about a static, patriarchal lecture mode. I’m not talking about a “knowledge king” kind of teaching. I’m talking about people agreeing to work together to hold questions open as long as they can until meanings are reinvented in ways that help a collective to thrive.
Q. You received a lot of critical claim and attention in your novels. Did it put a new pressure on your writing, or did it serve as a kind of validation that was liberating? Both, all and more?
I have been very lucky to have had some brilliant readers, passionate readers, speak to the books I have written, and those experiences have been profoundly meaningful to me. I don’t think very much about validation. I don’t mean to sound like a [jerk] — what I mean is, when I receive praise, I am humbled and grateful, but I don’t hold onto it very long or give it gigantic worth beyond the moment. When I receive criticism, I don’t hold on to that either. Both praise and criticism are fleeting experiences, you know? I don’t think I write for affirmation or validation … I think I write trying to make these small dorky bridges to others who might need a lifeline or just an image or story to ride alongside them in their lives.
I only ever wanted my writing to be useful to someone else. Or help someone feel like it was their turn to write or create something. The writing I love the most feels kinetic in that way to me. Inspires me, moves me to creative action. I’m pretty suspicious of prizes and accolades built from capitalism.
Q. Is “Chronology Of Water” still on track to reach the big screen? Have you been involved in that writing-for-film process at all?
Hell if I know, but I think so? I do know that Kristen finished filming in Latvia, and I have been told that she is in post-production now, trying to finish in time for spring festivals. I was a little involved early on, in terms of ideation and bouncing things back and forth creatively. I will also say that this film will be an arthouse film, for sure. She was interested in reflecting the experimental nature of the book. And you know for me, it’s not really a classic “bio pic.” It’s more like jazz — one artist riffed off of another artist’s work in a kind of creative jam session. That’s how it feels to me. I do know it will not be, you know, dull.
Q. Your TED talk has more than 4 million views the last time I checked. It is still as resonant as it was nine years ago! Did you have any idea that it would strike such a chord? And do you still have that dress?
No, I did not! I almost died doing it. That experience was much taller than me. Ha, yes! Yes I still have the dress…what a great question…I saved it the way one might save a wedding dress. I hope Miles [ her son] wants it.
Q. But let me get back to “Reading the Waves.” Talk to me about the word “transmogrify.” That or some version of it repeats many times in interviews you give and in the book itself.
I think transmogrifying might be the central theme of the book. I mean it both in terms of, say, frogs, or butterflies, and their powerful transmogrifications, what that has to teach us puny humans about constant change, constant life-death-life. The other way I’m into transmogrify has to do with fairytale and fable space. That story space. I was way too into Marie Louise Von Franz (a student/colleague of Jung’s who studied the world’s fairy tales)…but just in general, I think my novels are all oversized fables that got out of hand.
Q. Another line I keep thinking about, “Your failures and fears are portals. Step through.” For me, that is the best description of writing memoir.
I agree. I mean, you probably get this question a lot too — why go back into failures and fears in writing if it is painful?” I think memory and trauma and failure are carried in the body. I think writing releases and rearranges and rebirths the possibility of change.
Q. Related to that is an earlier passage I love in the book, “Instead of a conclusion, or proof of right or wrongness, I embrace storytelling again and again. I look for the places where stories and lives intersect, where the lines on the maps that divide us dissolve and shift.” It’s also a way to talk about the fact that in writing any memoir, we are stepping into a stream, a life story that might look very different from when it is written to when it finally arrives in a reader’s hands.
Yes! I mean, even stepping into the stream moves it around. Like, if I wrote “Chronology of Water” today? It would be a completely different story. Or I could STILL go back into the events of “Reading the Waves” and just stand in a different place from which to tell the story. This idea haunts me, fascinates me, mesmerizes me. I’m still thinking about it. I’m still willing to travel this idea.
Q. So much of your writing feels like an incantation. When you are writing, do you read aloud to yourself? What helps you fall into the rhythm?
That makes me blush. For some reason, that makes me shy and happy to hear. Thank you. What helps me fall into the rhythm is that I can hear it and see it. If I turn the volume down on my rational, logical, sense-making thinking, and turn the volume up on my sensory perceptions, imagination, and subconscious creative processes. So, of course, art, music, animals, the natural world all help me achieve the right volume … also sleeping. Because dreams.
Q. Hey, are you reading anything now that you’d recommend? Are you always reading as you write or do you take breaks when you’re in the process of a book?
I’m always reading something or other, or I’m looking at art or listening to music … art forms are pretty interchangeable to me. Doesn’t have to be books. When I was writing “Reading the Waves,” I turned to “Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice.” [A photo book of frozen landscapes with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit.]
Q. Last thing: Are these questions making any sense?
All of them!
Lidia Yuknavitch is the featured guest on the March 21 episode of Bookish, SCNG’s virtual program on authors. Register here for Bookish and check out past episodes by visiting SCNG Virtual Events.