Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

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Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe
Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe
Craft Advice with Lidia Yuknavitch
Craft Advice

Craft Advice with Lidia Yuknavitch

On not being a daily writer, engaging the senses, writing sex scenes (it's not what you think!), small and quiet plots, tiny intensities, "booping," and so many prompts!

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Jane Ratcliffe
Feb 27, 2025
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Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe
Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe
Craft Advice with Lidia Yuknavitch
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Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Lidia's favorite place to write is beside a body of water

I’ve read everything Lidia Yuknavitch has written at least once. Most likely twice…or more. In part, it’s because I’m so drawn to her subject matter: nature, animals, women, love, bodies, adventures, grief, hope, healing, and so on. And in part because her prose is astoundingly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Lyrical yet precise; truthful and full-throttle and tender-tender-tender. Each sentence is a revolution. It will blow your heart right open. Boom!

And I’m not the only one who feels like this. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Kristen Stewart has adapted it for film. Lidia also written Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and The Misfit's Manifesto, based on her TED Talk, On The Beauty of Being a Misfit, which garnered 4.5 million views. Her essays have appeared in Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Sun, The Rumpus and many more. And she is beloved amongst writers.

Lidia is also a generous, thoughtful, and gifted teacher. She founded Corporeal Writing in Portland as a way to offer her body-centered writing. Classes take place in person or online — I promise you, they will get you thinking about writing in ways you haven’t before.

If you missed Part One of our interview, you can read it here.


❤️ Massive, ongoing gratitude to all the paid subscribers whose support for Beyond not only allows me to keep writing this newsletter, it also supports The DeTommaso Dogs. Our monthly donation helps keep these sweet doggies and some kitties off the streets, healthy, and into their forever homes. Thank you! ❤️


Where do you write? Oh no, this could be an unexpectedly tough one to answer!

Let's stay with it. This could be true of other people for a million reasons. Right now, I'm currently nomadic. I'm not able to be at my home, but I'm not letting that stop me from writing. I'm remembering all the other writing-challenged times in my life: Like when I was too poor to have housing, I wrote on buses or in parks. Or when I was so pregnant, I just wanted to punch a wall because I felt crappy, I wrote in tiny little fragments in a notebook, because I didn't have an hour or two to do it.

When my son was born — and motherhood time and space isn't like any other time and space — I would write one liners on little scraps of paper, like Emily Dickinson did, and I collected them in a blue bowl, and eventually they were beautiful.

Did that turn into one of your books?

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