Misfit
A Q&A with Lidia Yuknavitch
BY KELSEY ANNE RANKIN
L
love, to be loved. I said my journey was different. When
I first started writing, I think I wrote to purge my rage for
myself and to agitate through art. I was publishing first
during the Reagan years, so that may have been part of
the zeitgeist.
Now I write to illuminate difficult ideas and open up
possible meanings. I write to make a bridge to others, even
if they don’t “like” what I’ve written; that’s less important
to me than whether or not they felt something moving in
their bodies while reading my work.
idia Yuknavitch is a beast of an author. Her
writing is raw, uncensored and has a strength
that can only come from living one hell of a
life (check out her Ted Talk “The Beauty of
Being a Misfit”). Yuknavitch — a University
of Oregon graduate and current literature workshop
teacher in Portland — has gone from being a professional
swimmer to a mother whose daughter died, and from a
dazed lover of substances to a best-selling novelist. Her
craft has always been constant in her life: She must write.
EW spoke with Yuknavitch about her artistic process
and life as a writer in the wake of her best-selling book
The Small Backs of Children (2015). The L.A. Times
called Small Backs an “explosive new novel” in which “an
Eastern European war orphan watches a wolf free itself
from a trap by gnawing off its own leg, then squats over
the abandoned limb and urinates on the blood and snow.”
What do you think is the most important thing you
share through storytelling?
How the beautiful and the brutal always coexist, and how
desire, beauty and magic can move even from or through
dark places.
Describe your journey as a writer in one word.
Misfit-y.
How do you describe yourself as a human (same
guidelines)?
Misfit.
The voice you use in Dora: A Headcase (2012) strongly
differs from the voice you employ in The Small Backs
of Children — how do you conjure and execute the
contrasting personas?
Dora actually visited me in a dream — the dream was very
realistic and I could hear her shouting. So, with Dora’s
voice, even though this sounds a little weird, all I had to
do was listen and follow her.
With Small Backs, I had to utterly atomize what we mean by the tradition of “voice” in
narrative. I was shooting for emotional intensities and differing subjectivities rather than a
traditional set of characters with solid voices or identities. I love to play with voice. I think
we all walk around with hundreds of them.
What provokes you to put so much of yourself into what you write?
I think everything ever written has its author in it, to differing degrees and intensities,
sometimes obscured on purpose, sometimes revealed on purpose. I don’t think I’m doing
anything differently from any other author. My mentors, Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker, were
in every character they ever wrote.
Who do you write for? Yourself, others or simply for the sake of storytelling?
I was talking to a big-time writer the other day who said that she has always written to find
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Where do you go — mentally and physically — when
you write?
I have a dedicated writing room in my home. I didn’t
always, so I’d “create” a space — sometimes that was a
closet or a corner of a room. I believe hardcore in over-
ritualizing your writing space, whatever that means to
you.
My writing room doesn’t look like any other room in our
house. Once you are in there, you know you are not in
Kansas anymore. I have to induce a kind of creative trance-
like state in the pure creativity stage. During revision or
editing I’m just a regular old cranky lady.
What has been your favorite part about writing so far?
When I’m deeply into the creative process of writing,
drawing or painting, I don’t want to ever leave. If it was possible to stay inside the creative
process forever, I would. But I love my son, Miles, and my art comrade and husband, Andy,
too much not to come back. It’s regular life that is the hard part for me.
How much of your writing is from your own life and how much is created by the
story’s characters? Are these two things separate and independent of one another?
Trick question! No. They are not separate and independent of one another. They are
inextricably linked, if we’re being honest.
So … what’s next?
I have a forthcoming novel from Harper Books called The Book of Joan (April 2017), an
eco-fiction (used to be called “cli-fi”) story based on a re-envisioned Joan of Arc story. And
I have a TED Book coming out next fall called The Misfit’s Manifesto.
where
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