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Lidia Yuknavitch has been “troubling the edges” since publishing “The Chronology of Water,” an eleven-page short story, in The Northwest Review. The story went on to become an anti-memoir of the same name and was later adapted into a movie directed by Kristen Stewart.
Yuknavitch is the author of several best-selling books, including the novels The Small Backs of Children, The Book of Joan, and Thrust, as well as a memoir, Reading the Waves. She recently edited and contributed an essay to The Big M, a collection on menopause that features work by Cheryl Strayed and Roxane Gay, among others.
I recently spoke with Yuknavitch for Episode 523 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a conversation in which we talk about shitty first, second, and third drafts; self-editing; and writing through trauma. This excerpt from our conversation has been edited for clarity.
—Brendan O’Meara
Brendan: I think that, early on, writers can struggle with writing a lot of bad stuff before they can get the good stuff. What’s been your practice for writing a lot of bad stuff and then knowing that, with enough practice, it gets better?
Lidia: I got rid of the binary value system of good and bad, and that helped. I moved toward a different model: There are only other versions, and by going through many versions, as in the natural world, in life and in space, something solid rises to the surface that you can curate and arrange.
So I’ve left behind the notion of, “First you have to make a bunch of bad writing for it to become something else,” to “There must be pages with words upon them.” It’s okay if the first version looks like barf, and it’s okay if the second version looks like barf with flowers in it, and it’s okay if the third version asks, “Is there anything in this part? Oh, look, if I pull this little piece out and this little piece out, they become magical.”
Brendan: I love learning about the idiosyncrasies in writing practice and routines. I think we’re all a little voyeuristic about how we go about the work. How do you like to warm up before you write?
Lidia: Do it with other humans, like collaborative writing, kinetic writing, with even one or two other people, even if you’re calling them at weird hours. So it’s not just the myth of the solo genius tortured writer—which is some bullshit—but putting yourself in connection, or a network, or mycelial models.
I also do a great deal of meditation before going in, and I’m a huge believer in inventing your own rituals before writing. They can be as weird as you want them to be, but heavy on the ritual element, so that when you go into a writing situation or practice it feels cool. It feels like you’ve reminded yourself it’s the realm of magic, it’s the realm of creativity. It’s the realm of There are things more beautiful than just you alone in your life.
I’m a huge believer in inventing your own rituals before writing.
Brendan: There’s a passage early in Reading the Waves where you talk about Joy Harjo’s memoir, Poet Warrior. [Ed: Harjo is the first Native American to serve as US Poet Laureate.] At some point, we have to understand that we do not carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story (mental), feel the story (physical), let the story go (emotional), then forgive the story (spiritual), after which we use the materials to build a house of knowledge. What was it about that passage that struck a chord with you?
Lidia: We’re carrying too much, for too long, from the things that have happened to us. And we carry them literally, in places in our actual bodies, which is what corporeal writing is all about. Let’s go look for them, liberate them, and rearrange them, instead of clinging to the hard things that have happened to us and carrying them too long. Figure out how to transform it, rearrange it, make it different.
Brendan: Do you find that when you’re trying to reshape the past, make sense of it, and write it down, that you experience a letting go? Or do you worry that it might be imprinting?
Lidia: Life is so hard and memory is so fucked up. And here’s why: When you go to write nonfiction, you’re sort of screwed, because there’s what happened to you, the actual events that you have to put through this thing we call memory, which is imperfect, and then enter a third stage, which is called storytelling, which is the curation and arrangement. I discovered that I can go back to things that have happened to me, and I feel completely different about them now, but I don’t often allow myself the freedom to let that feeling dissolve and form into something new.
Brendan: What are some of the things that you still struggle with today, that never go away when you sit down to write?
Lidia: I like the struggle. I’ve never been contra the struggle. I embrace the struggle. I’m curious about the struggle, so it’s not a “big bad daddy” coming at me. I have learned to inhabit and incorporate this struggle so that it too will dissipate. So nothing stops me on the page anymore. I also don’t care how it will be received. My novel Thrust cured me of that. I was more happy writing that novel than I’ve ever been in my life. I learned everything from that feeling.
Brendan: I loved this one sentence of yours: “Your failures and fears are portals to step through.” How did you learn to embody that in your art?
Lidia: I had a daughter who was born and died at exactly the same moment she was born—stillborn. That was trauma for me for many, many years, but when the trauma dissipated eventually, and I worked through those ideas and feelings, what began to surface was that I have to let go of a lot of ways of thinking and ways of creating that don’t correspond to my experience. I learned that the great wave of sadness and depression and trauma that can descend upon everyone at certain points in their life is also a place of new beginnings; it’s generative whether we want it to be or not. You know, “no mud, no lotus” is a more eloquent way of saying it, and I learned that in a terrible moment. But the terrible moment has never stopped yielding beauty and extraordinary flowers and ways to create with the fear, including by leaning into it.
Listen to the full conversation below.
