Make Art in the Face of Fuck: A Conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch

On talking to trees, narrative transmogrify, releasing old stories from our bodies, standing in community, art as resistance, and joy in the tiniest moments.

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Lidia Yuknavitch is one of my favorite people to interview because she’s astoundingly brilliant with an enormous imagination so her mind reaches into corners of the universe most of us didn’t even know were there. She loves animals in that full-throttle sort of way a child might, she loves the whole planet that way. She’s kind and funny and generous and will talk about anything with such tender openness my heart swells. She wants all of us to thrive.

Lidia is also one of my most difficult interviews because when I speak with her, I want to ask her about everything and I do mean everything—love, grief, frogs, rage, sex, 265-foot cranes, trauma, swimming, disability, hope, art, death, politics, violence, trees, painting, monsters, healing, addiction, kindness, community, surviving all that this world throws our way. This is because she writes about everything. And I do mean everything. A scene might appear to be about Lidia’s profound love of swimming but it’s really about loss, empowerment, helping one another heal, and the interconnectedness of the world. And so I must whittle my 5,724 questions down to a more manageable amount. Not easy.

Especially not easy for Lidia’s latest book Reading The Waves. With clarity, electric insight, and gentle curiosity, Lidia examines the stories she’s told herself about her life and the ways these stories have impacted her relationship with herself, with others, and with her body. Using the gifts of storytelling, she explores what happens to these stories if she moves to a different viewing location. Does the hold they have on her body and her spirit loosen?

Lidia is the award-winning author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, which Kristen Stewart has adapted into film, 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. She is the founder of the glorious literary arts organization Corporeal Writing.

If you’re interested in reading more, I’ve lifted the paywall on my first interview with Lidia for Beyond. And I’ve included the link to our interview for Longreads.

Enjoy!

xJane

I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I want to start with a question about trees and animals and dirt and water – all of whom you thank in your acknowledgements! And in your final chapter you write, “Your family of origin is only one kind of origin. Your ancestors track back to trees, water, minerals, space, otherness.” Can you talk about your relationship with these elements and with nature in general?

I don’t think of it as, “Oh, I have a neato relationship to nature.” I think of it more like, “I’m getting closer to understanding how non-human existence is something we are intimately related to.” As a kid, coming from an abusive household, I spent a lot of time in our backyard and in this vacant lot across the street that had big evergreens in it. I was drawn to talking to actual trees and dirt and water, it comforted me and it helped me in a chaotic childhood situation.

What I wrote about in Reading the Waves as an adult is different than that. That was a kind of kid intuitive magic to go to non-humans for help. At this point in my life, I’m beginning to let myself learn that my human existence is this tiny, tiny piece.

It's interesting you said when you were a kid that you were talking to the trees because you write in this book and elsewhere, that as an adult you’re still talking to the water and the trees and the rocks and the seals. What does talking to these beings look and feel like to you? Are you speaking your words out loud? Are you hearing their responses? Or is it some kind of vibrational experience in your body?

The fast answer is, it’s more like sensory reception – if your whole body was a sensory receptor. When I was younger I had an affliction where I heard some voices that weren’t there. At the time I was prescribed lithium which was terrible and just the wrong approach. When I look back at that experience, that thing that I thought was an affliction or something I had to recover from, probably was an early seed of my adult ability to recognize and pay attention to sensory perception all around me, not just human voices.

I do talk to water out loud. I do talk to trees and animals out loud and rocks, especially if no one’s around, cause who’s going know, right? But what I receive isn’t like hearing a voice. It’s more, as you said, a full body, sensory experience. It’s not exactly a regular dialogue. I don’t get some perfect answer back when I send something out. The more important idea is that I’m relational to something besides myself, besides something human, and I’m open to that. But sometimes I get answers, too.

That's so beautiful, Lidia. When you get answers, can you shift the sensory into words?

Yes. Because I've spent my life making word pictures and word sounds and word nourishments and heart language, I can translate it. I’m not meaning to make it sound like some mystical thing. It’s just that when I receive some experience with the non-human world, my translation device is words, and so I start painting or drawing with them.

Are you more comfortable in the non-human world than in the human world?

Oh, my god, yes!

Can you articulate why?

Oh, man, Jane, I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure that out. For a while there, I had this theory that being born Caesarean, I was plucked from my element too soon. But I made that up. I was trying a story out to see how it felt.

Another theory I had was that I’ve devoted my life to working collaboratively with other humans. So maybe the other side of that is for nourishment, you need to reconnect to non-human. I think that that theory is a pretty good one.

I’ve met others like me. And it’s true that some people are more solitary beings. I’m finally to a place where I can say that’s not a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with me. That mode of existence has stuff in it that we can give back to others.

I find for me, being with the non-humans doesn't take such a toll on my nervous system. My nervous system gets jacked up faster than I would prefer, even when they're pleasant exchanges.

I completely identify with that, and I try to explain it to people. But people just love being with people so much.

With everything that's happening in the world right now, how are you feeling about the safety of the planet and the animals? And is it changing your relationship with them at all?

I don’t think we’ve been safe since humans arrived on the planet. We’ve made some amazing stories on our planetary existence, and I think we’ve fucked a lot of shit up. I’m not surprised by the current state of events. I wrote at least two novels that have frighteningly similar elements in them.

My relationship to the natural world is slightly more devotional and a little more intimate. I don't think humans are the only thing important.

It might be good for us to talk to a lot more people outside of America who have experienced what we're going through much longer and much more terribly than we have. I notice some people are acting like, “Oh my god, this has never happened.” Yes, it has. America, maybe open the doors and windows and talk to some of your global neighbors.

Another thing I'm reminded of is that those of us who have been carrying past abuse, or difficulty, or trauma, or illness, or disability, or oppressions and repressions, and carrying the water of that and the shit of that, and the trying to help with that, we're particularly well-resourced for this moment. People can treat us like we carry woe and it’s a heaviness we have but really we have the skill set needed. And we've spent our whole lives working on those skills.

So true. Your book is an intertwining of bodies, memories, and storytelling—and the movement that occurs between them and because of them. Can you share how you perceive these relationships?

That’s the central question I've been exploring my whole life. In this book, I entered the space of narrative transmogrify. Like frogs. That space is also the space of memory and imagination and art making—in my case, writing. I started meditating on that sphere of transmogrify, walking around it and asking, “Well, if I move my body around experiences, what transmogrifies are available? Is this where I grow a tail? Or if I let go of being wounded about this memory, could I grow a wing?”

Narrative space allows you to ask different questions than your regular life does.

I love that. You write about how we all carry stories in our bodies. What does it mean to carry a story in your body? On a literal level, what is happening?

We’re loving them. We're holding them in our bodies and we're cherishing them. But we're also unable to release them if they're traumatic or difficult. There's a way in which, even though this sounds weird, when a sad thing or a bad thing or trauma happens, it's really hard to let the story release from your body, because it's so familiar, and it's so intimate to you and your experience. There's this little bit of fear like, “If I let it go, who will I be?” Or, “What will happen?” That's a hard release.

So when I say we're carrying the things that have happened to us as stories in our body, I mean it literally. My most recent example is when I hit menopause. Like lots of people, I gained a bunch of weight. At the time, I felt terrible about that, and it made me cry and rage. But the writer in me wanted to take it on as a metaphor. Like, “What is this weight? What is this heaviness? What is weighted?” And once I started doing that, I was in that transmogrify space of “what else could it be besides a bummer?”

Are you doing that in thoughts? Or do you journal about it?

I'm thinking it. I'm meditating. I'm going on walks. I'm carrying it and turning it over like a stone. And I'm writing and drawing.

Sometimes the stories we carry aren't even our own. They're ancestral stories, and sometimes they're ancestors who died before we were even born, but nevertheless, we're carrying their stories. What do you think's going on there?

We're not just who we think we are. We're connected to all of existence. The elements in space are also in the earth and in our bodies. The idea that human individuals are objects of discrete individuality is simply not true. It's a concept we've put on top of existence. That in combination with—and you can check with physicists about this—there's no such thing as linear time.

You write a lot about non-linear time and the interconnectedness of all beings. When you're living your day-to-day life, how well are you able to apply these concepts?

I’m just like anybody else in the grocery store, cursing at the people who are in my way. I'm regular in the ways everyone is. But a few practices help me kind of touch it every once in a while: one is meditation, one is swimming, and one is art making, including writing and painting and drawing.

In my life, that's me getting close to touching little moments of what I'm talking about. But the rest the rest of my dailyness is as dull as anybody's.

Do you get caught up in the stickiness of life?

Sure. I'm in some stickiness right now. I do know enough from past trauma that if you live long enough, and I'm sixty-one, when you get to the bottom of the ocean you recognize it. You're like, “I've been here before.” So I don't feel as obliterated. I feel bad. I'm in pain. But I have this, “Okay, I'm at the bottom of the ocean again, let’s see what’s down here.” Or look at your body, is a new thing emerging or leaving? Do something useful while you're down there.

As we're working through the old traumas, there're new traumas of varying degrees unfolding constantly. Are there ways to prevent those from becoming these entrenched traumas we're talking about?

I know everybody's hurting, and everybody's exhausted, but hurt and exhaustion have marked humanity in every epoch. When you decide to see it, and when you decide to do something about it, how not to internalize the really supremely fascistic and grotesque and idiotic stories coming at us right now is to stay in community. To keep collaborating; lock arms or fins or tails. And not, “I'm going to receive all this terrible shit and take it as mine.” But this is my time to stand with others. And that's not necessarily a different answer than it would be in any terrible time.

Even on a quieter scale, life is constantly generating trauma.

I completely identify with what you're saying, and it's a similar answer. As hard as it feels, especially if you're an isolate by nature, to help one or two other people, because that activity of trying to help somebody else, like you're helping me right now, and I'm humbled and grateful and filled with love that you have reached out, it's taking turns carrying and then passing.

Ursula Le Guin has written beautifully about that idea, but it really got in me that you're just taking your turn, carrying and passing, or composting, or whatever it is.

That's beautiful. In keeping with that, one thing I was really struck by in your book, Lidia, and I know you do carry a lot of the trauma and grief, but there were times where you were having these very visceral responses to difficult things that were coming at you. You were barfing or shitting or fainting, and I thought is Lidia's body moving these through her, so they don't get attached? I felt like your body was saying, “No, we're not going carry that. No, we're not going carry that, either.” Does that ring true?

Oh, god, that is the greatest question and the greatest possibility. If it is what my body's doing, I’m so fucking grateful. I mean, it's not pleasant in public when I’m exuding and somatizing but I hope you're right. I've never thought of it that way. I so love this idea. I feel like you just gave me a gift.

Oh, I'm glad! Having said that, you’ve been on such a journey with your body, Lidia. Swimming, sex, pregnancy, still birth, abuse, rape, abortion, cutting, hiking, scoliosis, falling off trains, broken ankle, skinny dipping, pain, drug addiction, menopause, and more. If you feel comfortable, could you talk about your relationship with your body now?

One thing that strikes me listening to that list is how hard the cultures we inhabit try to take those stories away from us. And tell us how to be, or think, or feel in each of those categories. And how important it is for those of us who inhabit those categories to keep telling stories, to cut through the lie that we're being asked to carry talk about an oppressive weight.

And secondly, if I was a frog, I'm in that part from tadpole to frog, where my arms and legs haven't emerged yet, but I can feel them. I'm in the growing pain part. I'm at a real threshold from water to land or something. I can feel all those things, but I don't know what's going to emerge body-wise.

I can answer one thing concretely based on your question. I’m grateful for this body. I’m grateful as fucked up as it is, I’m grateful. I mean, talk about a ride or die.

Yes! You have such a brilliant, tender, wise, active mind. Is it always going? Or is that not really where you draw your wisdom from?

I don’t believe in the mind-body split but I do have one of those imaginations that’s on high beam and never stops. Which is heavy. It’s very lucky that I can write novels, because the weirdness of my novels -- that gives me a beautiful form I can fill. For the chaos of what life is like, which is my brain’s doing that all the time. My imagination doesn’t stop unless I’m meditating, or writing, or swimming, or painting, or drawing. Even when I’m sitting talking to people, it’s doing it.

Is that exhausting or exhilarating or both?

Both. But it’s also beautiful. I’m so grateful I have an imagination that can rearrange images and ideas. And that art exists so I have a place to put it. If my worth is anything while I’m here, it’s the realm of art, which I’ve said a million times.

Speaking of that, you’ve famously said, “Make art in the face of fuck.” I even have a t-shirt that says that. Given the times we’re in, what does that look like?

I think everyone who makes art understands that the art that we’re putting our energy toward probably needs some resistance element in it, some revolt element in it, some teeth. Even if it’s quiet and beautiful. I think in every epoch, when some terrible things are happening, the artist's art shape-shifts a little bit. But we artists know what shape-shifting is. We were born with it. So we got this.

Shape-shifts more toward the political?

That’ll mean different things to different people. There will be quiet and small gestures that no one ever sees but will be incredibly meaningful. There will be noisy, loud, in-your-face political gestures, and we need those too. There will be an underground movement, already happening, and we need that. We need the intellectuals. We need the poets, we need the musicians, so it’ll take different forms, but nobody’s art stays the same their whole life. It moves in relation to your relationship with the world.

So true. You are devoted to helping others. In fact, your last line of the book is: “Where I have blossomed let me decompose and generate another’s growth.” Why is this important to you?

I think that’s the reason we’re here. Not to make ourselves important, but to keep the human and non-human larger story alive and in motion. I sneak it into my novels too, where somebody dies and it becomes something. That’s what we’re here for.

I feel like every time we talk, I somehow nudge us towards the younger generation: do you have hope for those coming up right now into these times that we’re in?

Oh, god, yes! But I define hope differently than I used to. More along the lines of Rebecca Solnit’s ideas about what hope is. It’s a labor. It’s a collaboration. It’s a building and blooming. The youth that I am near and work with intergenerationally, and my son and other people much younger than me, they’re lit up. I can see it whether they see it or not. And whatever’s next, it’s theirs to create. If I’m still around, then I’ll be helping carry the water and doing whatever needs to be done. Like, “Point me in the right direction.”

I love that! So much is hard right now, where are you finding joy?

Well, someone named Joy just sent me something beautiful over email that I wasn’t expecting. I surprised myself by smiling as big as I smiled when I opened the image. That makes me remember to say out loud that joy can come from anywhere, and it doesn’t matter what else you’re feeling. You should watch for it even in the tiniest moments, maybe always in the tiniest moments.

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🌸 I’m excited to share that Lidia will be answering your questions today in Beyond’s Chat! Join us there and bring your questions! 🌸

⭐️ Plus, find Lidia’s answer to the Bonus Question: What concrete, regular practices do you follow to nurture deeper self-care, community care, and connection? (Of course, her answer involves beetles!)

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If you enjoyed this interview with Lidia, you might also enjoy this one with Cheryl Strayed:

Bodies, Forgiveness, and Tiny Beautiful Things: A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed

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Thank you for being here! ❤️ You know how much I love your comments. I read them all.