I first met Lidia Yuknavitch on the page when I read her anti-memoir The Chronology of Water. I remember putting the book down a few pages in and thinking holy shit, you can write a memoir like this? This is what memoir can be? I had never read anything like it before, and I kept having to put the book down, to savor the prose and stay in the story. I proceeded to carry it around with me in my bag for the next few years, returning to it again and again, dissecting the word choices, admiring the descriptors, and gaping in awe of how it was all put together.
Since then, all of her books have struck me in their own ways. Her new collection of short stories, Verge, is no different. I caught up with Yuknavitch over email to discuss the book, motherhood, writing, and more.
You’ve written novels and nonfiction before, and now short stories. What is your favorite form, and why?
Well, I don’t really have a favorite form, but I am absolutely hopelessly addicted to form, so there’s that. I gravitate most often toward what I’d call the lyric fragment; I mean that’s the form that I work from most often. Some lyric fragments won’t stop coming—those turn into novels. Other lyric fragments make a discrete pattern, and those become stories or essays. As you know, I am traditionally trained with a PhD in Literature, so I still love the traditions and all the forms I have inherited, but for my part, for my tiny moment on the planet, I want to conjure stories between forms. That’s my jam. I probably have more in common with poets, who move through language, image, and emotional intensity vertically, or with filmmakers, who cut and splice image sequences.
All of these stories felt intense and urgent: ugly truths and unexpected relationships, searching and longing, in all forms. Can you talk about what inspired these pieces?
Absolutely. What inspired these pieces was my deep devotion to people and characters who live, love, thrive, struggle, and die inside an “in between-ness” in life. A liminal space tied to their real material conditions. At the heart of each story in Verge is a character fighting for life in a space too often overlooked or erased or even killed by the dominant culture. I wanted to write between binaries and make that space—which is real—vibrate in the body of the reader long enough for them to witness certain characters, bodies, lives. So the bodies of children who inhabit war, or children who are consumed by sex trafficking or the organ transplant black market, or sex workers or janitors or queer people or wives and mothers or laborers who keep getting consumed by the material conditions and attitudes that surround them—those are the bodies and characters I mean to illuminate briefly. Those are the characters I find beautiful. My definition of beauty does not live on the gleaming celebrity surface of capitalism. My definition of beauty and love hang in the moment between life and death, because I am a woman and a mother who held life and death in the same moment in the body of my daughter who died the day she was born.
How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?
GOOD GOD HOW LONG CAN THIS ANSWER BE???????
The creative community can kill its own precious hierarchy, for a start. Because women and mothers are currently discarded, erased, or just used as the raw material to sustain a certain model of artistic genius. The creative community, happily, is starting to experience plate tectonics, cracks, and fissures in the very ground of meaning, as evidenced by writers of color and queer writers who are punching through the strata and de-centering the tired out layer of lit we’ve been smothering underneath for decades. Women in particular, and I include anyone who identifies with the body and space and experience of “woman,” suffer the direct brutality of patriarchal culture since their bodies-as-objects have been directly and indirectly (through representation) used and abused in the service of the construct of power.
What mothers in particular could use is a radical redefinition of the creative economy out there. Mothers need childcare and residencies and room to breathe. Mothers need a collective and collaboration. Mothers need diapers and baby food and milk and a heated home with beds and blankets. Mothers need their culture to care for them as much as they have born and cared for the culture that feeds on them. In fact, the very definition of “mother” needs to be blown up and re-storied.
What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?
My son Miles left for college. This feels exactly like my heart has dropped out of my vagina. I think the word “leaving” should be “(c)leaving.” Interestingly (to me anyway), I am simultaneously experiencing a radical autonomy. Frankly, I didn’t realize how far she’d drifted away. So this is stunning to me—this new being and place. 56 year-old autonomy.
On the page, I am experiencing an urgent need to punch all the way through to polyphonic voice, parallel universes, collective truths in place of a hero, plot, and action. I secretly believe this is a collaborative effort ongoing with many of us.
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
Well Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous rearranged my DNA, for sure. Talk about the power of lyricism over plot—the power of the image and language to conjure story without some dumb allegiance to plot… just loved it. Terese Mailhot’s Heartberries is a supernova. I think every mother on the planet should pick up Jennifer Pastiloff’s On Being Human. Like everyone else on the planet, I also swooned while reading Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House. Boom. Holy mother of oceans. Tommy Orange’s There, There (like I need to tell anyone this) is a cosmos shiver. And Garth Greenwell’s just released book Cleanness makes me GIDDY. Giddy, I tell you. People who need to laugh-cry should read Courtenay Hameister’s Okay Fine Whatever. And Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter andChelsea Biondolillo’s The Skinned Bird are blow-your-socks off great—I keep giving those out at Corporeal Writing because I CAN. One to watch for that I read an early version of: Carter Sickles’ The Prettiest Star.
The stories in this collection, as well as your novels, center on those on the fringes—“misfits,” to use your word from your book The Misfit’s Manifesto. There is despair, but also hope, though it may not look as such. What draws you to these stories, these characters?
They are more beautiful to me than traditional characters. By about a gazillion. You know, in any system or form or organism, the edges give the center shape. That’s not nothing. That’s maybe everything.
What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?
Adjust your creative process by reinventing it using the very material conditions that you perceive as struggle. How I came to deeply love the lyric fragment was by and through the “time in fragments” experience of having a baby and working more than full-time simultaneously. Not only did the literary fragment present itself as the only thing I had time and imagination for, but magically, making entire constellations from literary fragments opened up a world to me. Everything I have written since Miles was born happened in that realm (Miles is about to be 19). So the very material condition of having “no time or energy” transformed into… well, my entire creative life.
The other thing I’d remind parents about is that the creative process of parenting and the creative process of writing or making art are inextricably linked, rather than opposed.
What’s next on the horizon for you? I am hard at work and deep into the terror of my next novel, as well as a new nonfiction anti-memoir and a book about writing. I am the kind of writer who has to have multiple projects going in order to complete any of them… Gemini. What are you gonna do, you know? Other than that, trying to keep Corporeal Writing afloat for as long as possible or as long as it’s useful.