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!
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
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.
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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?