Taking Turns: A Conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch

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

In honor of Beyond’s one-year anniversary, I would like to share the interview that set this newsletter aflame. It’s a celebration of how far Beyond has come, how many new readers are here today, and it also marks the transition of my interviews into a paid series. For the price of a new hardcover twice a year, you’ll get two interviews a month, full of wisdom and hope, with today’s greatest heart-centered minds, like this one with Cheryl Strayed or this one with Ross Gay, along with upcoming interviews with Emma Gannon, Nicole Chung, Brandon Taylor, Jeannine Ouellette, George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, and many more! There are also all the wonderful guest contributors and inspiring new columns in the works.

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Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a visionary. Her memoir, The Chronology of Water, sits atop acclaimed essayist Roxane Gay’s list of five favorite memoirs and was optioned for a film by Kristen Stewart. Lidia’s newest dystopian novel Thrust comes out in paperback this June. An instant bestseller, Thrust was lauded pretty much every place that lauds books and rightly so. It quickly became one of my favorite novels of all times.

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 also the author of 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?