“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

It would be fair to say that in life and on the page, I lead with the body. For me the two things that mediate all experience are language and the body, and the body in particular—with its contradictions and fluctuations, with its emotional intensities and crazy drives, with its sensory universe—endlessly fascinates me.

I guess I’m to the point in my life where I’m willing to see just how far writing by and through the body can take me.

I’ve noticed something about the forms and traditions we have inherited in this country when it comes to writing. They don’t particularly fit my corporeal experience. Plot points, tropes, modes of characterization and point of view, even description practices don’t quite line up with my body and what she has to tell. I can’t help but wonder if I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Different questions are emerging just underneath the surface of my skin. Different dreams are crouching in my fingers. What if the story became a series of retinal flashes or sensory jolts? What if the character experiences radical change a hundred times during the course of a single day, rather than a stable and coherent character arc? Who the hell came up with that character arc thing anyway? What a crock. What if language lets loose sometimes and follows the spasms and lunges and retreat of an actual body? What if resolution isn’t the endgame, or even possible? What story does the body have to tell, how might the body inhabit a point of view, how might the body inhabit language? In what forms and rhythms? What images might emerge from underneath the ones we’ve been trained to admire?

This photograph is very dear to me. [see below] I was on a long walk one day in the middle of my life, in my late forties, and I came across this dead baby bird. I looked around the bike-jog-walk path to see if anyone was around. Dead silence. No one and nothing stirred. I squatted down there where something alive had been felled, and before my brain caught up with my actions, I snapped a photo. The dead baby bird was so mind-bogglingly beautiful to me I couldn’t help myself. The individuation of the feathers overwhelmed me. What was left of its eye. The faint blush and blue colors. The texture of almost-wings against black gravel. I couldn’t breathe.

I have many photos of dead birds. There is a reason that dead birds move me. I understand how it may seem morbid to some people. But other people will understand what I mean when I say I have been at the death moment and held a life as it moved from living to otherwhere. I have been at the birth moment too, and this: I have been at the birthdeath moment. So death doesn’t fall into story for me like it does other people. I don’t see a line with a beginning culminating in an ending. In life or in narratives. I see living and dying happening all at once.

The dead baby bird image is thus brutally beautiful to me.

That day, in the presence of the dead baby bird, I convulsed.

What would that physical and emotional convulsion look like on the page? In an image? How would I tell that story? Those are the kinds of writing questions that interest me these days. I look for images and words to convey my corporeal reality.

Convulsions.

To have an experience in which the body shudders, emotions surge, in a way that you are not able to control. To affect someone or something suddenly. To loosen language and let it go wherever it desires.

Writing as corporal event horizons.

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AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• The best book I’ve read in the last few months was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. I chose it initially because I love Claudia’s poetics, but the second it was in my hands I knew something was up. It had heat shimmer. Right book. Right time. Right place. Right body. Right voice. Sometimes a book flashes up in a moment of danger and changes everyone’s life.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Invent your own path. It kind of doesn’t matter how anyone else does it. I know it’s a strong pull to follow the lead of others, especially others that you admire, but in the end? You have to invent yourself, your writing, your writing practice, and no one else’s will work perfectly for you because they are not you. You may as well get to inventing then. Make it up. Embrace it. Ritualize it. Stand up for it. Take a bullet for it. It’s all you have.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I sleep with new books that I love. I also sleep with my first copies of books that I have written when (if) they are published. Yes in the bed. Literally.

By Lidia Yuknavitch

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

photo credit: Joshua Dillen

July 1, 2015: Lidia Yuknavitch

I’ve become obsessed with the truths we tell about ourselves, and the bio on Lidia Yuknavitch’s website begins straight to the point and with the hard truth:

In 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer.

Ever since May of 2011, I have hoped to feature Lidia in this series. That was when I read The Chronology of Water, which one reviewer admits to considering throwing across the room, but that same reviewer ends with this paragraph:

You should read this book… You’ll grow weary from all the sex (really, mountains of sex), crave some punctuation, and your grammar siren will start screaming. But, if you’re a human, and especially if you’re a human that fancies him- or herself a writer, The Chronology of Water should be mandatory. It’s beyond a study in memoir writing. It’s a study in Lidia Yuknavitch. This is how it should be done.

In The Chronology of Water, the writing fits the life it mirrors. Like the story out of which it grew, it’s

[a]bout fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments–how I understood my entire life. In the language–image and fragments and non-linear lyric passages–that seemed most precise.

A striking chapter tells the story of a hot pink Schwinn bike “with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars.” Her father brought it home to cheer her up after her sister left. She was ten and thought “it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen…”

But she didn’t know how to ride a bike.

So when I came outside to touch the hot pink ride, beautiful as she was, all I felt was terror.

Besides being a hell of a story, this is a living, breathing object lesson. How a beautiful pink bike can also be an object of terror. How in a fictional world a bicycle could be beautiful to one character and terrifying to another.

Lidia writes:

In water, like in books–you can leave your life.

About the breakup of her second marriage:

I would have done anything for him. A love unto death. And…
Goddamn it.
I’m already lying. I’m making it all sound literary.
It was messier than that. A lot.

At the end of the book in an interview, Lidia writes:

I do know that when I’m inside writing I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s like being inside a song or a painting.

Before The Chronology of Water, Lidia published three collections of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel. Since The Chronology of Water, Lidia has published her first novel, Dora: A Head Case, which begins like this:

Mother is cleaning the spoons again. From where I sit in the kitchen, I can see the reflection of her trippy-looking head: bulbous skull, stretched down mouth, eyes that scoop away at the rest of her face. A droop-faced woman. Jeeeez. Just look at her. She’s rubbing the holy crap out of those spoons. Poor, silvery utensils.

That’s what it felt like to be her kid, too.

On July 7th, her new novel, The Small Backs of Children, makes its way into the world. From its publisher, Harper Collins:

A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art.

With the flash of a camera, one girl’s life is shattered, and a host of others altered forever. . .

In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own.

As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question.

Lidia’s website bio ends:

Oh. And I am a very, very good swimmer. Which must be why, as my friend Mia says, I have not drowned. When pulled under, kick.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how LIDIA YUKNAVITCH spends her days.