Lidia Yuknavitch

Hope Is A Story We Haven't Figured Out How To Inhabit Yet

photo credit: Andy Mingo & Michael Connors

Lidia Yuknavitch is a visionary. And her vision holds both the deepest, most hollowed-out sorrow of life and the soaring beauty. In her worlds, one aspect cannot be alive without the other.

Her latest novel Thrust devotedly preserves this balance. It’s a book of everything: there’s talking turtles, whales and worms, motherwaters, orphaned children, abused children, magnificent children, children in trouble, children healing the world, water, immigrants, trauma, landscape-altering-climate-change water, gender fluidity, staggeringly glorious sex, prison reform, the Statue of Liberty, cunt apples, lifewaters, time travel, godlessness, bigotry, freedom, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, violent pressures on men, violent pressures on women, bodies as healers, more water, anguish-and-strength-and-joy lineage, liberty of architecture, revolution of objects, floating boys, healing rooms with ropes and ass holsters, and hope.

What connects all of this, what offers sweet harmony, is Laisvé, a young motherless girl, and the precious objects she collects. Laisvé is a “carrier” and her objects act as talismans transporting her through time with the guidance of a talking box turtle to save lives—and create a new, kinder society. Dodging the raids of a growing police state in 2079 where her city is steeped in water, Laisvé travels to the 1990s, the 19th century, and the early 21st century meeting with Frédéric, a French sculptor and the architect of the Statue of Liberty; Mikael, a wrongly imprisoned boy; Lilly, a dictator’s daughter hoping to help Mikael; a group of laborers manifesting the Statue of Liberty governed by their lineage stories: and Aurora, who lost her leg during the Civil War, runs healing rooms, and takes in forgotten children.

The prose is tender and lyrical and precise, yet unyielding. The horror and sadness will be witnessed. The beauty and promise will be witnessed. The braiding of the stories is gentle, as fluid as Lidia’s beloved motherwaters, yet likewise steadfast. The world is revulsion; the world is radiance. And Lidia is master of both language and love.

Lidia herself is kindness and love. She’s a stalwart supporter of the writing community and of humans in general. I sometimes think she has more belief in us than we deserve. She’s the author of The Chronology of Water, The Book of Joan, Verge, The Small Backs of Children, The Misfit’s Manifesto, and Dora.

We chatted about coexistence, the younger generations, and, of course, hope.

Let’s talk about animals of the land, sea, and air. Humans have been unspeakably cruel, genociding thousands of creatures, engaging in factory farming, experimentation, circuses and other forms of “entertainment,” fighting, hunting, demonizing them, and so much more. One of the things I adored about your book was the sensitivity to the emotional, psychic, and physical violence humans have perpetuated toward animals. What moved you to have animals so interwoven into the fabric of this story?

In our lifetime, we've inherited an understanding of humans as being toward the top of an existence hierarchy. But from the first recordings of human history, in indigenous cultures, we aren’t on the top of a hierarchy unless it's a power hierarchy. That's not a new idea. That's a very old idea. But what I'm interested in is if love is a character in this book, and love could move beyond just human concerns, person-to-person concerns, how might love travel? Or how might freedom travel, if we detach it, or dislocate it from primarily human concerns and let it move more freely, and laterally, and less hierarchically. For me, that means toward the planet and other forms of existence. It doesn't seem complicated to me.

Humans have this cool thing about them, which is they're capable of love. What we do with it has kind of been stunted or contained by the stories we've been told about what to do with it. So, in my own way, I'm trying to set it loose again and ask, are there other things we could do with that mighty, incredible power, which is love, besides procreate and have a bunch of failed relationships?

What types of stories do you think we’ve been sold that have created this dominance that we believe we have over animals?

I don't mean to make it sound too easy, like indigenous cultures are all of the good, and everything that's not indigenous is of the evil. Although a person could make that argument, for sure. But what's interesting and beautiful about indigenous cultures is that animals nearly always, across the globe, have a role to play in coexistence. What's particularly horrific about colonial projects and capitalism is that animals are meant to be conquered and owned and put in the service of a kind of, I guess the terminology to use right now is white supremacy power movement. But on the normal human puny level, animals are there to serve us, or for us to go look at encapsulated in cages, or to eat, and so on. There’s so much hard work so many people have done for ages to try and wake their neighbor up to the idea that we coexist. Animals are not just for use and consumption. But that war has been going for a very long time and the sort of illuminating moment has not presented itself globally in a way that it might. So while I'm here, I'm trying to contribute to the larger effort of storytelling where we keep reminding each other to try to loosen the questions back up. It probably won't change in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean you should stop trying,

Various characters have visions of a healed and vibrant world and they always include myriad, healthy animals. At one point, Aurora says: “The animals are coming back from everything we’ve done to them—but we have to be in our bodies differently.” What does this mean? How can we be in our bodies differently that will bring back the animals?

Well, first, I'll confess I don't 100% know. As Lidia the person I don't have wizard knowledge. But where I'm at right now, I know enough to know it must be different. And it may mean we can't eat them anymore, which on my own personal journey and legions of other people have come to that idea. It may mean we don't put animals in the service of humans. It may mean a coexistence. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has that amazing book about what you can learn from animal being. If you were to pretend you were a jellyfish for a day, what would you learn about jellyfish existence. So, it may mean, reorienting to animals as experiential and intuitive and emotional knowledge. When I put it in a character that we have to be in our bodies differently, what I mean is we have to let go of the stories we've been told about the supremacy of the human body and ask, what are other ways of being. It's not like we have to go to outer space to find that. Other ways of being have preceded our existence. Humans have been around the tiniest, tiniest amount of time. And what we came up with is domination. That's our big move.

And so to be in one's body differently. So many people are doing such good work. They're asking it spiritually. They're asking it physically. They're asking it emotionally. They're asking it scientifically. If we could get more of the stories to loosen up and stop worrying about the smallness of my individual life. My life's important to me, I want to keep living it for as long as possible, but the important thing that happened while I was here was not me. The important things that are happening in the tininess of my lifespan, I’m an energy blip. Listening to myself right now, I must a little bit be talking about loosening our grip on ego existence. And asking, how many ways are there to exist? But, Jane, I would overhaul the whole educational system, the whole theological system, the global. I would overhaul everything.

Laisvé can communicate with animals. How did this come to you? Do you believe this is possible?

I don't really know the answer to that. I'm open to the idea. My mind doesn't shut down when somebody talks to me about that. What I was trying to plug into, is that as children, so many of us truly believe things like I can breathe underwater. Or I can fly. Or I can talk to animals. The beauty of imagination in children isn't just cute or precocious. There's a true beautiful energy there that we slowly whittle away at as we enculturated it into adults. I'm just trying to go back to the power of imagination, and how extraordinary it is. But if it turns out to be true that there is communication possible with animals and humans, it wouldn't surprise me. I always thought Jane Goodall had sort of cracked that nut.

You’re a keen advocate for the younger generations. In fact, your life seems to be devoted to blowing open a path for them. You dedicate this book to them, writing: “You are the new world.” And when you write of one of your characters: “She wanted literature to split open so that more voices and stories and bodies could get through…” I felt you were speaking about yourself! What do you envision as this new split open world? Can you imagine a world of peace and kindness?

I can, I can. There's something I'm hopeful about in the present tense, believe it or not, because I think we're seeing it. For example, queer identity and trans identity and non-gender binary identity in the bodies of people who are younger than us. We're watching an evolution/adaptation in front of us. And it is a story change, a sea change. It's like an avant garde or a vanguard, and there's no stopping the fact of their existence. And it doesn't matter what old, white, cranky people think. I mean, they're getting a lot of airtime, but they won't forever, they'll die.

So, in some ways, it's like we're watching the wave of change. If we stop looking at ourselves for a second, or our politics, or people in power, it's happening right in front of us. It's happening environmentally, where we're seeing climate disaster, and terrible damage. But COVID taught us something quite fascinating, which is for those difficult years—and I want to remind people that, yeah, that was a difficulty but war has been waged forever, and has lasted longer than two years in many places, so let's keep an eye on that difficulty—but in those last couple of COVID years, did you notice how the plants and animals reemerged slightly differently, like with quite a bit of gusto. We were leaving them alone for a little bit, and you could see the air change, you could see animals emerging, and that was only a couple of years. If we really were making the big changes necessary globally, the planet could reemerge, get reborn, whatever words you like for it. People younger than us, people under twenty, are born into this story where everything's dying, or born into the story where there's tremendous loss. But the other side of that story, that's where all beginnings happen. So they're here, and they're doing it and either we're going notice and help them forge the path, or we're going to keep getting in the way.

We talked about this generation last time we talked. I shared about my teaching experiences, which have only intensified. I see anxiety and the depression on the rise. And I also see the most incredible listeners who deeply tend to one another and hold each other's stories. Both of these things are happening at the same time. It's almost like their nervous systems are just getting blown so open the only way through is hold each other. But I don't even think they realize they're doing it. I feel both profoundly concerned. And also in awe.

Nervous systems getting blown open, that’s a good way of putting it. I use the sentence a lot that children and teens and young adults are a new species. And I think people think I'm speaking metaphorically or something. I'm not. I mean it literally.

I agree. For the first time ever, I'm feeling like I have to take a semester off. I can't quite articulate why but it might be because I’m the sort of teacher who gets involved, and so much is happening right now.

Probably. A thing we have to always remember in the times we're in all over the globe is we have to take turns. Nobody can hold it all the time. We have to remind each other to take turns.

I think you carry a lot. I don't know if you're carrying it psychically or in your body or in what way but I feel you are one of our biggest carriers of vision and wisdom and love and compassion. Oh, all of a sudden I got this image of Linda Hamilton in Terminator Two, this badass chick just blowing it all open. But I wonder where you feel that in your body? How you experience it? Is it an excitement? Is it an anxiety? Is it a grief? Is it all of that? And what do you do with it? Do you get help carrying it? Are you able to ever put it down?

First of all, I love that you mentioned Linda Hamilton, because when that movie first came out, I was the only woman my age in the theater, and it was filled with eighteen-year-old boys, because it was a Terminator movie. I was in the second row and I loved it. I sat through it twice. I just loved it. So, thanks for mentioning that.

And then to your question, I'm pretty shy and I'm an introvert. So,I feel pretty puny on the daily in a general sense. But we have this amazing chance to help dig the global ditch if that's what needed or help put out the global fire if that's what's needed or help carry the stories so that other people's existence can be made visible or just clear the path so somebody else with an important story can get through.

So how I experience it in my body is sort of like…I'm a good worker. I know how to help. I don't know how to be the Joan of Arc figure, or the power figure, or the leader. It’s not so much that. It's like I know that the labor we have in front of us is worth it for who's coming behind us. I know we have to shift the labor all the time, because we got it wrong. And we need to stay strong for the parts where we got it really wrong. So, it's more like that.

And then I poop out. I fry. I have to take breaks and respites and I have to trust that other people can take turns, and then I see them doing it and it's beautiful. But nobody can do it all the time. I worry about those people because they succumb to the Savior syndrome. And it'll get them, it'll harm them. Because that story in and of itself is the colonial idea. God like Jesus idea. I try and think about bees. And ants.

I was thinking about ants when you said “I'm a good worker!” Did you ever read The Once and Future King? Remember when Merlin sends Wart into the ant colony to experience what good workers they are?

Yes. And I absolutely was scratching at some of that same idea with the worms. Examining ways of helping each other. If the word worker doesn't work or labor, if those words don't work, then just the human potential to do things together and create an energy. Rather than the human potential to own and have power. Those are two different energies to me.

Totally. And when you post pictures on social media of the water, is that one of the places where you're taking a break and rejuvenating?

It's the place. Probably other people have this. For me personally, if I get in water, I feel part of something larger than myself. I feel like I'm part of a giant life rhythm that’s not fixed on my puny human concerns. So that works for me. It doesn't have to be water for everyone. I don't know why it's water for me, but it is.

Let’s talk about water. In Laisvé’s world, water is what’s reshaping the landscape and human and animals’ lives in a dramatic manner. Throughout the novel, there’s the Motherwaters. And whilst on a ferry, viewing the nearly entirely submerged Statue of Liberty, Laisvé’s father urges her from the edge. “He knows the pull of water in his daughter.” I think you also have this pull. And later Laisvé says: “Perhaps I was meant to be a sea creature after all, but some slippage, some cosmic rupture, sent me through my mother’s body and spat me out on land like a wave throwing rocks on the shore. Leaving me something like a marine mammal, or a terrestrial fish, or some creature from a folktale.” This is you, yes? Could you talk a bit more about your love affair with water?

Absolutely. I mean, so it's in The Chronology of Water… see how subtle I am? I just keep writing a water book over and over again. It is a true story that as a young child, I used to leap off docks and leap into pools and jump in rivers before I learned to swim. So that was a problem. I’d sink like a little blonde rock. So they got me swimming lessons fairly early for that reason. The swimming lessons were in Lake Washington in Washington State, and cold as fuck and I was little and I would turn blue. I didn't even get swimming pool swimming lessons. I got lake-cold Pacific Northwest swimming lessons. So I thought I was part of the water. It wasn't about pools for me.

I don't know where that first impulse came from. How would I know, I was little, and I did it. It's only as an adult, I've gone back and tried to make stories about it. I just make hundreds of stories about it that could be true, because who knows, right? It could be I wanted back in the womb. It’s not so great out here. It could be I think life is oceanic. It could be I had a neurodivergence, because I had pica, where I ate non-nutritive things like paper and pennies and rocks. I ate several pennies, so pennies are a big deal. So maybe it was partly part of that. Maybe I move towards water for those reasons. I'm not sure. But once I was a swimmer, I could navigate the water in a way I couldn't navigate the world. And to this day, that's true.

Do you still swim a lot? Do you go into the open water?

It's pretty cold in Oregon. I do still get in ocean water. And I do swim in the pool all the time. Once I'm in it there's no better high, there's no relaxation technique that works better, there's no therapy. All it takes is to put me in some water and I'm so…the words happy and content seem stupid…I just feel free.

Does it feel like home?

Maybe that's part of it. My sense of home is different than some people's because my family life was crap. I moved around a lot, so I didn't have a huge home feeling ever. Although, as an adult, I definitely have a warm fuzzy feeling around the home we built for our son. I think it's more the word free I feel. Free from human. Again, just a part of something bigger than myself. Also it doesn't matter how old I am. Or if I'm pretty or svelte or fat or thin or smart or dumb. In water, none of that matters at all. I think that might be why like it.

That's beautiful. Such a rare feeling. In many ways, this is a story of inherited trauma—about being “haunted by other bodies, by family stories, by ancestral sorrow.” Yet, it’s also a story of inherited and acquired hope. It provides a blueprint for healing. But it’s an unconventional one. Can you talk about both trauma and a possible way through—collective and individual?

Yes, I'm so glad you said that. That makes me feel seen. You saw a piece of the story that's very important to me. So first, I just want to express gratitude. But to the question, I think it's a hopeful story, too. Something that I've witnessed many, many times in my own life and in the lives of people I love, is that we return to the terms of trauma to try and heal from trauma. And that is very painful and frustrating. And so in this character, this girl, in some ways, she's there like an animal to remind each human, No, you're looking in the wrong place, look over there. You're not even looking in the right place, it's over here. It’s in the dirt, or it's in the water. You're going back to the place of your hurt and looking for the terms that will heal it. Look to the worms.

She's trying to redirect attention toward a healing that moves outside of the sphere of the trauma itself. That would mean you would have to look for and find hope, in a place other than the devastating hole we dug. You would have to imagine hope is in a place we haven't looked yet. Or in a language we haven't figured out yet. Or a story that would have to leave the comfort of the stories we've been told about who we are and enter a different understanding of the story of hope. In basic terms, I tried to write about this in The Book of Joan, but what if it's not God, and it never was? Some people were into that, and some people not so much. I'm continuing to explore the idea that hope is a story we haven't figured out how to inhabit yet. It won't come from staying inside the story of trauma.

It also feels very connected to the body.

Well, I'm kind of hung up on that.

There’s a lot of profound sorrow and fear and grief in here. And I feel like you’re quite empathic. As you're writing this, I imagine you’re experiencing it in your body. What sort of effect does that has on you? Does it take a toll? Or is it liberating in some way? Or both? Or something else? I can't imagine you're separate from these stories you're telling.

That's a great question. So many of us, maybe all of us, are carrying grief that's too heavy for us—in different forms. In one place on the globe, it's war. In another place, it’s heartbreak or poverty or any number of terrible, terrible grief and loss. So it's a good question, how do we carry it. Because you're right, when I'm writing the stories, they're in me, and I'm carrying it.

I guess the kind of obvious answer is that by writing, by bringing it to form, storytelling form, it's a place where transformation is possible. If I just leave it in my body and walk around with it, it leads to pain or illness. So that's one way to talk about it, that writing itself, storytelling itself, gives us somewhere to put the feelings, emotion, pain, fear, anger, that's bigger than us. It's a fertile place to put it, if you can bring it to artful form. Hate speak is not fertile. You can bring that rage to artful form, it can dissipate out into others as an energy that we can use as a strength. Storytelling or poetry or painting or dance reminds us that the shit that's bigger than us can find energy and form and we can use it to help each other. And so I think that is what I'm up to, or what I'm trying to do with the overwhelming feelings that you can feel when you're just sitting at your house alone, and it's like, holy shit, I can't get to this. It's too much.?

When you finish a novel, do you feel a release in your body?

Sort of. When I finish a novel, I've inhabited it so deeply that a little bit I disappear and it's kind of scary. But if I go swimming or I go sit by water, or massage works a little bit too, I can come back to my body and say, nope, you didn't disappear, you’re okay. There’s a kind of release there. There are writers who make entertainment literature, which we need, by the way. I'm not one of them. I do write books because I can't not write. I am thinking deeply about what's hard in the world. So, yes, they are a form of release. And it's always my hope that I've held a question open that can then release itself because somebody else took up the question not because I answered anything or I know anything because I don't.

Aurora has created these precious and sometimes elaborate rooms where she guides clients and loved ones through a variety of body-focused/somatic acts geared to their needs. “I bring to the surface of the body, and the psyche, stories held so deeply within us that we shudder to speak them. I bring stories to life, so that we might recover our own bodies. I am wholly narrative, I am the hole of narrative, I am the holy narrative. These rooms are a storyletting.” Can you talk about the body as carrier and the body as healer? I wanted to go to those rooms. And I will never look at an apple the same way in my life.

Good! I want to go to the rooms, too, by the way.

We need those rooms.

The body as carrier, I want to pay homage and tell you about an inspiration for that idea, was my friend who isn't here anymore Ursula K LeGuin, who has an essay called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which anyone could look up and it's just beautiful. It’s a love letter to her that this girl, Laisvé, is a carrier. But it's also based in the idea that as a child, like so many children in the face of trauma, I disassociated. Most of my life's been trying to get my body back. Swimming helped a shit ton. I never really cared about winning or losing races, but swimming definitely brought me a very long distance back to my own body because I was strong. I had muscles, I could feel them. And so racing, put me back in my body in a big way. I still as an adult have problems with my legs; like sometimes I literally can't feel my legs. But I'm mostly back in my body.

That's amazing.

So it was me taking the question of trauma and disassociation and trying to take the story away from trauma and disassociation and ask, what's possible and generative in there? What stories telling possibilities emerge from the disassociation space? That's not just crippling, despairing, horrible, numb, blackout? Sometimes when I put a character underwater or in fog or whitespace or some strange surreal realm space, or outer space. it's asking, what was inside dissociation that didn't kill me? Is there anything useful to learn there? And I guess I think there was or I wouldn't keep inventing it on the page.

But in these rooms, they’re so in the body.

Right. Aurora’s idea about healing is that if you help people feel their own passion and rage and fear and all the mix of emotions from the inside out…it’s like when I hear cello music, it feels like it goes up my anus and threads through my spine and comes out my nose. Cello music just has this vibrational quality for me…so Aurora is trying to get that to happen to people who are hurting. Maybe that's rope suspension. Maybe that's a room where your whole body vibrates, like a tuning fork for an hour. She's experimenting with a kind of healing from the inside out that bypasses the inherited story that you have to move through the psychotherapy industry to achieve healing.

You have this incredibly potent line: “She loves her father because she understands how deeply the love of a daughter can make meaning in the world, even when the meanings in the world seem to be shutting. Without daughters, fathers are dead.” And a bit later: “What daughters can do is carry new meaning into the world. Like a beacon.” Fuck. I would have to put the book down and scream at times.

I could cry right now just thinking about why I wrote that line not because I'm inspired by my own lines, but the books that moved me as a teenager and young adult, had daughters in them. Antigone was a big deal to me. King Lear's daughters were a big deal to me. Ophelia was a big deal to me. And then other young women characters like Joan of Arc, or other people. Mary Shelley was a big deal to me. What I saw and loved in those daughter characters, or young women characters, is that they could have taken patriarchy somewhere else, if anybody had been listening. They tried to disrupt the sort of House of Father or Law of Father or Power of Fatherland. They all tried. There was this brief moment where it almost worked in in Greek literature, in Shakespeare, and then all the literature that happened after that.

If you look at African literature, or diasporic literature, or indigenous literature, the daughters have more navigational power, and more chance to disrupt and rearrange than in particularly white Western literature. I saw this this space of daughter vibrating and I wanted it to last longer. I wanted it to lead to the profound change that when I was reading the books, it looked like that's where the story was going to go. And then it wouldn't. So now you've figured out my stick, which is I want the daughter space to lead to profound revolutionary change.

Which it does in Thrust.

Well, in my imagination, anyway.

Laisvé is able to travel through time bringing with her potent objects to help those who await her. She thinks of herself as a carrier—which put me in mind of the young girl in The Organ Runner who carried human organs. I believe they’re around the same age.

Yes, they’re related, for sure.

Do you see a particular power or grace in these girls on the cusp of womanhood?

Yes, though it's not limited to girls. I'll say that. It's not so much biologically determined that it must be a girl in the binary sense, but I do think the sort of space of the girl body which anyone could inhabit, it's not biological in my mind, but the space of the girl body is just this possibility space of enormous imagination and blood and human possibility. Becoming. A space of becoming, that's good way to put it. That we've managed to stifle, repress, incarcerate, and shut down. With our theologies. With a patriarchal order that never lets a girl get this more than this tall, in terms of who she becomes. Yes, it's changing but very slowly. And we run into the same old repressions over and over again, because we have yet to change the structure of becoming.

You’re right, in that I am obsessed with that space. It's probably clear to you that we show girls how to become mothers or wives, as if that's their only storyline endlessly enrages me. There's more than one part in the story that's about that. And I'm not subtle. So it's easy to find.

One thing that really rose up in this novel that I don't remember being quite as centered in your other work was the way you're talking about men. The continuation of that paragraph is “We’ve made a wrong place for fathers in the world, so they throw their lives at heroisms and braveries and wars, and winning and owning, and desire poking out of their pants in a way that is desperate, and then they die with a want inside that is larger than a body.” And Lilly ponders: “Sometimes she wondered if boys carry all our sins for us so that the rest of us can feign innocence of the world we made—a world with less and less space for them to feel loved.” And “she’s directed her life toward the purpose of saving boys from becoming monsters.” Later: “Who steps inside male violence in some small hope or rerouting the story?” and “Anything to avoid punishing him into becoming a permanently violent man.” There was so much sensitivity to men and the challenges they're facing?

Yes, it's a big deal. And, you’re right, it’s the first time I've approached it on the page. It has a direct source, it's that I have a son.

Of course. I hadn't thought of that until just now as you’re tearing up.

I love my son. I'm not going to give up on men. No one can make me. He's the most beautiful creature I've ever encountered in my life. He’s also helped me remember that all the young men who came through when I was teaching at a community college for eighteen years, who were troubled, many, many of them were troubled, or they were vets, or they were the first person in their family to go to college, or they were the sons of farmers, or very conservative people, or they had just gotten out of jail, or rehab. And there was no way I was going to give up on those young men.

There really are other ways to be a man and it's on us to illuminate the story paths to follow. It's on all of us to give them choices that aren't the stupid ones that we claim we hate and punish them for. There has to be some space to say, okay, then what are the new storylines? And how do we help them step into them? I want to be on the side of the river where I can have rage and anger at what men have done to me and people I love and global devastations but I want to be on this side of the river where we're giving them something besides death and power.

What are some of the other storylines we can offer?

Well, again, the sort of beauty that we're witnessing with new generations of people coming right up in front of us like amazing new species of plants or flowers. They need not be stuck in a man/woman gender binary. They need not castrate themselves in ye old Freudian terms to become real men quote unquote. You don't even need the binary male/female much longer, in my opinion. I think it's outgrown its usefulness. Things that people who are born into a maleness could do that serve themselves and their friends and their culture that are not what we have previously called manly. The character in Thrust has been understood as a violent teen but what he's carrying is beautiful and profound if it could just be redirected. That's the nutshell of me Mikeal’s entire character.

And he becomes one of the architects of the new world. Frederic writes to Aurora: “You offered your differently bodied experience to anyone who was willing to learn how to be in their body differently as well. You meant to push flesh against “the idiotic limits of the ridiculous reproduction impulse.” From your point of view, we’d gotten the body all wrong.” And Aurora writes: “And to the blossom of every girl ever born: May that violent rush of cosmic possibility in your body, between your legs, be let loose from reproduction. May you open yourself to the cosmos, creating new constellations. May it wreck the wrong world back to life.” You were speaking to that a little earlier, but I just had to read all that gorgeousness out loud.

I just didn't want anyone to miss the idea that the bodies of women are for something besides reproductions so I got a little overzealous.

That’s one of the passages where I don't have words. I just I felt your book, Lidia. My body felt it.

Oh, that's all I ever want!

Toward the end, Laisvé speaks to a room full of children about various extinctions that have happened on the planet. She closes by saying, “But glorious things happen all the time too.” And lists all the creatures that survived. I wondered if we could end on this same note. What are some glorious things that you’re aware of? You have mentioned some, but any glorious things you want to add on?

There's beauty, every nanosecond around us, all the time. I say this a lot, so it's probably cliche, but the brutality is often right near it. And that’s existence. It hurts but it's also wondrous that creation and destruction are so near each other, are threaded through each other. For every example we could list right now, something terrible that's happening, and many terrible things have happened, are happening, will happen, it is beautiful, that the story is bigger than us. It is beautiful, that we don't know the next chapters, they could be anything. It is beautiful that rejuvenations are happening or new species are emerging or the planet could change form and story. It is beautiful if we stop worrying about our singular, tiny moment. The sort of rush and hum and flow of existence is just so much bigger than us. And this is where I'm with the astrophysicists. This is where I leave my novelist chair and just try to remind people that good people are doing good work, right next to you. Is there some work you could do to help? And also the story is just so much bigger than us, so much bigger. We’ll be gone. You and me, we’ll be gone. I don't know what world my son will be in, then he'll be gone. So, could you leave something cool before you go that could help the next animal or tree or person?

That's a perfect place to end it. Thank you, Lidia. I mean, I’m leaving out all the time travel and the no god and so much more. What a novel! I'm going to sound corny saying this but I feel like you're such a beautiful person, Lidia. And I’m so honored to have this conversation with you. So, thank you.

The pleasure is mine. I love you across this stupid Zoom thing.

I've just never read anything like this. As I’ve shared with you, the closest I've come have been written by men, where I think men have been given more allowances to go in and fuck with shit.

Agree. Hard agree.

So you did that. But then your fucking with it came out with a totally different result. You came up with apples and cunts as healing.

You get it. You get it.

And worms, and girls inside whales.

You totally get it. I'm so happy.

Formulating these questions was me trying to intellectualize what wasn't really an intellectual experience. It was really a body experience. I don't know how else to put it.

You made me so happy. I’ll be high as a kite all week. That somebody can hear the story. It's huge. For me, that's all I've got. That's my only skill.

Can you speak to this notion that this what men get to do?

It’s been true my whole adult literary career, I have noticed that more often male authors are given that navigational freedom on the page is how I would put it. It doesn't do a lot of good to just go wah. Or say, “that's not fair.” We have to write our way there. We have to blow it open as we can, even though that's a sort of gross way to put it. But women get through. And non-gender, binary people and queer people, they get through. So we just keep kind of eroding the wall with the help of worms and the help of animals and the help of rain. It’s my hope that it's not for me that I get through on occasion. It's that it leaves a crack for whoever's coming next. That's the importance. That's the reason to do it.

I think this one's leaving much more than a crack.

We’ll see. You see how repressive it is out there. I did the part I can do. Now I’ve got to go work on something else, so I don't go nutter.