Lidia Yuknavitch

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body - or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“To the daughters of Eve, that they may teach men that love is not lechery, nor the simony of voluptuousness, but a…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art.…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn't what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation,…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“We’ve made a wrong place for fathers in the world, so they throw their lives at heroisms and braveries and wars, and…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“What I learned from that intensely educational period of my life is that one kind of misfit is the person who suffers…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

Too, some of my teachers helped me to navigate those books, showed me the maps and paths and secret decoder rings -…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. IN fact, when kindness happens to us, we go…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to…

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through…

— Lidia Yuknavitch