Lidia Yuknavitch on Entering into a Lineage

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Lidia Yuknavitch about her new book, Reading the Waves.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Early in the book you write, “aren’t we always entering some storyline that existed before we were born, and will continue long after we die? In some ways, storytelling is all I’ve got.”  I think that’s so true and that we’re entering into a lineage. It’s epigenetic. It’s in our body, it’s in our families, it’s in our environment. And I think it’s so astute of you to articulate it in this way, and I think this whole book is a testament to how that influences you. Do you want to say anything more about that?

Lidia Yuknavitch: I can say a little bit.  Thank you for caring about that, because I do care about it a lot too, and it’s what I have to share with others. But a thing I would say is, I think we get stuck a lot by letting certain stories kind of inscribe us, or tell us who we are or how we should live. And the other space of storytelling is this one you mentioned, where it’s already moving, and we step in and out of it in different ways, and that’s such a more expansive and magical and life affirming way to think of story space, as opposed to the story of my family is…the story my family tells of me is… my partner’s story of me is… the story of my grief is…. Those kind of press in and inscribe us. And I’m trying to move away from that and toward this, you know, story space as bigger than us and existing in all time, and we can move where we step in and out. I’m just so attracted to that idea. And like I said, I’m not finished thinking about it or living it, but here’s where I’m at. So, it seems worth sharing that in case there’s a couple people for whom that would be useful to do.

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Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence, and the short story collection Verge.  Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. Her new nonfiction book is Reading the Waves.