This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

Who Should Read This: Queers, first and foremost. Anyone with a complex or complicated relationship with drugs and/or alcohol. Those who know death. Fans of Gertrude Stein. Fans of Virginia Woolf. Anarchists. Punks and sluts and baby rebels. Swimmers. Frog lovers.

Pairings: Phone dismantled, broken, or at least off. Somewhere you can sit for many hours in a row because you might not be able to stop reading. Something soft and old you hold for comfort. A smooth gray rock from the beach. 

If you are in her cult following, then you know that Lidia Yuknavitch is an artist who absolutely refuses structure and form in any traditional sense. Still, the market and its demands have forced the word “memoir” onto two of her books. One was The Chronology of Water, released in 2011 and now a cult classic that Kristen Stewart is making into a film. The second and the latest is Reading the Waves, a book that bucks tradition of form especially hard.

To state the obvious, an interview is an inherently structured format that neither supports her mind nor the discussion of her art. So I really struggled with how to have this conversation with her, until the morning of the day we spoke.

I had an early session with my therapist and burst out sobbing. This hard cry, unusual and gorgeous in its violence and relief, resulted directly from finishing Reading the Waves. This book, if it is about anything, is about rewriting your own story, retelling your own narrative in whatever way reflects the constantly changing nature and capacity for meaning-making and memory. This book seeks to return to memory through repetition, and, in each return, to reshape the memory and make it a source of strength rather than a source of pain. To be more concrete about it, Yuknavitch writes of her traumas, which include a lot of subjects and themes I write about: mental illness, suicide, guns, Vicodin, alcoholism, Los Angeles, and the Pacific Northwest, water and the ocean, deeply complex parents, family filmmakers, and painters, to name a few. The book circumvented personal wreckage that landed me in the middle of it that morning with my therapist.

This in and of itself gifted me insights and release, but the gift of gifts that I hope will serve you, readers, as well, was talking to Yuknavitch about the inner workings of her life as artist and human, the inner workings of her books, and her process in making them.

I hope you experience the love, comfort, and fire of this blessed and sacred person, as I did in this conversation. If nothing else, hear about how to write a book that has absolutely nothing to do with anything you’ll learn in an MFA program.

I first read your work around 2012, and my professor Kim Barnes said about The Chronology of Water: “We have 300 pages, but how much do we know about Lidia having read it?” I’m wondering the same about Reading the Waves. So my first question is: What are your days like right now?

I was thinking today about how you have to shapeshift and reinvent yourself over and fucking over again, whether you want to or not. Maybe this is why there’s no way to know an author, or even another human, completely. But we can share the courage to keep shape-shifting and changing. We can lock arms through the shitty parts and say, “Okay, I’m growing a tail, and it hurts, and I don’t understand it. But I’m gonna lock arms with you ’cause you’re growing a wing, and you don’t understand that.” Can that be an answer?

I would say standard-issue Yuknovitch answer, yes, great.

In Reading the Waves, I circled words that appeared in close proximity and in unpredictable rhythms. I realized you were doing something. You asked questions about what happens when something is repeated: a conjuring or a way of remembering.

For anyone who’s read Gertrude Stein, it will become quite obvious that I’m completely devoted to that one essay that’s in Lectures in America about repetition and her completely radical redefinition of what repetition is, it’s not redundancy. That’s a kind of patriarchal understanding of what repetition is. Theory defines repetition as insistence. I was trying to perform what she was theorizing. I was trying to perform the idea that repetition is not rehashing. It’s reshaping, recreating, re-curating.

There’s this whole universe of what it is to be alive that sits watching us. It often goes ignored, unseen and unspoken to and unheard, and for today, having just finished your book and trying to think through how to get to the right questions, that collective distance from the whole universe is my heartbreak. So, the other question I wanted to ask you about is: How are you filling the craters in your heart these days?

I have a really smart, brilliant woman writer friend named Kate Zambreno, who wrote this amazing book recently about dailiness. I think about what you’re talking about every nanosecond of my existence, and the only thing that has ever helped ease the heart-wrenching part of being alive and dailiness is working in community, collaborating with other humans and nonhumans. If one of us has food, the imperative is to share it. If one of us makes a buck, the imperative is to immediately redistribute it. In this arts community, we made [a community called] Corporeal Writing. It’s a community that is built on mutual aid and exchanging imagination. And part of our imperative is how do we get more of us not to die? Period. In my lifetime, I’ve not always succeeded. The deaths are part of what keeps you going. The difficulties, like that dailiness that’s threaded through your question about heartache, and that kind of what do we fucking do? The only answer I keep coming back to is collaboration and community. It’s not always the community you thought you were part of. Sometimes, it’s about recreating and shape-shifting those communities because different things are at stake than you thought.

You mentioned your writers’ workshops and learning space, Corporeal Writing. How did that start?

You know, people together having a drink, going, “Hey, no one’s doing this. Let’s do it.” With Corporeal in particular, we were interested in the fact that there isn’t access to art and literature degrees for everyone, and why not? We were interested in why the “special” people who get MFAs are kept apart from the regular people who have to work their jobs. We were interested in divisions between genre, poetry, and fiction and nonfiction, as if they’re separate rooms and a strange colonization of art forms that keeps poets unpaid and [makes] bestsellers rich motherfuckers. We were having a drink and thinking about those questions, and a community emerged. I think we’re about 10 years old now.

We don’t do everything right. We fuck some things up, but then we try to learn and get better. COVID came and almost killed us. Trump came and almost killed us. But now we see, we’re like a rogue cell. We’re not an institution. We’re not a nonprofit. Not a corporation. We’re like-minded people getting away with it.

What stories do you feel we’re most missing right now, or what stories do you still need to hear?

Everything with a target on it now is exactly what we need more of, and everybody else should get out of the way. Anybody that has a space opened up for their own work, it is our job to jam a foot in the fucking door. Not to go look for a pretty crown.

So this is where Virginia Woolf also comes into play, To the Lighthouse specifically. If the structure of a piece of writing must follow the structure of the thing it’s describing, how do you create rules for that for yourself?

Yeah, Virginia Woolf [has] been of primary, profound importance to me. But writing Chronology of Water is what taught me how to bring form and content—in relationship to each other—away from the rules I had inherited. It wasn’t a teacher, although I loved my teachers; I still love them. And it wasn’t another writer, although I intimately followed their patterns and absorbed their imaginal magic.

What does that mean, you “intimately followed their patterns”?

Well, with a writer like Virginia Woolf, I noticed repetition. I noticed performative language versus analytical language. By performative, I mean the language moves away from [its] traditional uses, “There is an orange-and-red sunset upon the horizon,” and she rearranges the lexicon itself so that it’s doing the thing it describes.

In Chronology of Water, I wasn’t doing that exactly, but I was after a different thing, which is: What if my body had a point of view inside these experiences, and what would that do to the language? I’m getting much better at curation. I’m starting to see that we instinctively move toward language, grab it, and say, “I want to say this thing. I want to describe this truth.” A phrase from [Virginia Woolf] that I throw out all the time is “Put the pieces where you may.” It’s all about arrangement. The plot is not what I’m after.

One of the phrases you repeat again and again in the book is about how your mother was born with one leg six inches shorter than the other. So much of the book is about how this made her powerful, despite the common perception and experience she had with others, where they treated her as weak. We’re in a reckoning with the ways we can lose, when physical or other capacities needed in a fight just aren’t there in the obvious ways. For reference, the current administration and how we’ve very quickly gone from bullying to something much more dangerous. How do you bring a lesser-understood skill set, a skill set perceived as weakness, to bear against someone who’s trying to hurt you, to protect yourself?

It won’t sound useful until the day it’s useful: Story space and our ability to transmogrify, to go to imagination and rearrange the story, can save your life. But we tend to hold on to the stories of our wounds a particularly long time because they’re familiar. Because we don’t know how to escape the story where we were bullied or harmed, right?

This is where I turn to frogs and seals and butterflies and ribbon eels. I’m not trying to sound fantastical or speak in fairy tales or metaphors. I mean literally what frogs do; it helps me to remember: We are not incapable of some shape-shifting
ourselves.

You’ve talked about “compositional avenues” in a previous interview. What are the compositional avenues and strategies of fiction versus nonfiction?

Well, there are some obvious ones. Like in nonfiction, you’re not supposed to just make shit up. I am not as allegiant to the plot of what happened. My allegiance is to the essence of the experience. That has its own compositional weirdness. But if nonfiction is a hallway with doors, some locked, on either side, trust me: If I can figure out a way to pick a fucking lock on the page, I will. But in fiction, not only are all the doors open, but all the windows, too, and there’s no ceiling or floor. It’s the ocean. It’s my happiest place. I would live and die there if I could. But then we can’t eat, and I can’t help other people.

So what are you doing with Chronology of Water and Reading the Waves?

I don’t know to what extent I succeed or not, but I am trying to help more of us stay alive together. I am trying to help more of us believe we can make art, and that it might matter, not just for oneself, but for the person waiting just behind you, who doesn’t yet realize... Sorry, I got a little choked up.

I think my next question is about maybe whatever’s caught in your throat. Which is: What about the ones who don’t want to stay?

It is not for any of us to say who should stay and who should go. But it is our responsibility, if we are staying, to decide what to do with it. In Mrs. Dalloway and also in the movie with Nicole Kidman, The Hours, Virginia [Woolf] has this line about Septimus, where she’s like “Someone has to die so that the rest of us may carry on.” And it’s kind of a cold line, because she’s sitting there writing a guy about to commit suicide. It’s also life and death existing in each of us, every nanosecond. There’s no time where we’re not all participating in death. We’re all moving in that cycle.

I wanted to ask you about fiction versus nonfiction because of the ways that you resist memoir but have written it, at least as far as your marketers are concerned. But, selfishly, I’m at a point where I’m struggling with knowing what it is that wants to come out. I have something stuck in my hip that’s been that way forever, and it stretches to my back and my knee. It’s taking over the right side of my body. Somebody keeps telling me, you have to let that go, whatever that is. It feels like the freedom that comes from release will be reckless, blow up everything in its path. So I wanted to hear from you about a path forward, or perhaps a genre forward, knowing that you write to survive.

That’s literally the seed of what Corporeal Writing is—to be asking what stories you’re holding in your hip, go look for them, and tease them out on the page, like exorcism or shamanic journey or something. Mine was my daughter’s death: It gave me chronic back pain for 30 years, and like, who am I if I let go of that? I get it. You are speaking my love language. It’s like you said—the freedom from it could obliterate, or who knows what it could do. It’s terrifying.

Monsters.

Learning to love monsters is different from learning to love evil. But what I really wish is that that genre would die. We’ve never needed it. It’s a capitalist market tool. It’s bullshit. Am I saying, I wish there were no poets? No, I’m saying that putting a wall between the poet and the fiction writer and the nonfiction writer and the dramatist and the journalist is ghettoizing. What energy we could be creating if those walls weren’t there?

I really struggle with the over-intellectualization of art. I feel we’re missing our connection to our own common sense, or to a sense of what’s collectively true. That spreads, and then everyone has the right to twist things.

When I think of literary forms and writers, we’re all just passing through. The art is older than us and bigger than us, started before we were born, and will exist after we die. So we’re all just passing through, taking a turn, which is why I don’t entirely care about the asshats. I’d rather spend my energy with my turn I have on the planet, again, locking arms with the people who are spreading the spores of good. This is life-affirming.

In reference to Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute, you mentioned the theory that you can build a story around a sequence of emotional intensities rather than a traditional beginning, middle, and end. Do you map out your intensities? Or are you following your body through a book?

That question gives me nerd glee. I love questions that are process-oriented. I follow intense images that come to me—I’m super visual—and, if I use plot for anything, it’s useful to me in this one way. What’s the thing that happened? Once I have a plot nodule, then I go Virginia Woolf on it and ask what is the fan of emotional responses around it? Pretty soon, the plot part falls away. I might have used it to make the node, but once the emotional intensities make their fan, I can dance with any of those and extend it for 50 to 100 pages.

When I was talking to my therapist about this dichotomy between the life we trod through in which we toil and make our way, and then the whole big life that is the water and mountains, and like, you know, the question: What are birds? So I wanted to ask you: What are birds?

Birds are evidence that linear time does not exist. They used to be dinosaurs. They’re the original shape-shifters. It’s magical that something can fly that we didn’t build. They bring it in this amazing motion, with a tiny, beating heart.