• Lidia Yuknavitch on Waiting for the Waves

    In Conversation with Jordan Kisner on Thresholds

    This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places. Thresholds is a co-production between Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub

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    In the first episode of 2025, Jordan sits down to talk with Lidia Yuknavitch about menopause, where stories lodge in our bodies, having a creative process that takes the shape of an ocean wave, and more.
    Lidia Yuknavitch: Process wise, I move creatively much closer to the anatomy of an ocean wave, and by that I mean that the storytelling and the imaginal and the ideas and the images are inside me, kind of, gathering energy like a wave before you can see it in the ocean. And I don’t worry about how long it takes anymore, cause I’m old now so I’m like, It’s coming, calm your boobies, it’s coming. Therefore maybe I write every week for a while, and then I don’t write at all, and then I write for a whole month, and then I don’t write for a week. I just wait for the waves.

    Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

     

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    Virginia Woolf’s idea (articulated in her journals while she was writing To The Lighthouse) that a writer should “arrange whatever pieces come your way” • The exclamation “Oh my oceans!”

    Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader’s Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. 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 newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. She is a very good swimmer.

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    For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud.

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    Thresholds
    Thresholds
    Thresholds is a series of intimate, surprising interviews with writers and artists you love about the transformative experiences (surprises, crises, existential freakouts, u-turns, breakthroughs) that have shaped their work. The life-wasn’t-the-same-after-that moments. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.





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