Austin Community College where Lidia Yuknavitch studied.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
1585 E 13th Ave, Eugene, OR 97403, United States
The University of Oregon where Lidia Yuknavitch received her Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch after receiving her Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Career
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
2016
Lidia Yuknavitch on TED 2016.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
2017
Lidia Yuknavitch at the 2017 TCG Conference in American Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
2018
Lidia Yuknavitch with Kristen Stewart in 2018.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
2018
5736 NE 33rd Ave, Portland, OR 97211, United States
Lidia Yuknavitch with Jen Pastiloff at the McMenamins Kennedy School in March 2018.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
2019
Lidia Yuknavitch with Cindy Cunningham in 2019.
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2020
Lidia Yuknavitch on KBOO Community Radio in 2020.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch. Photo by Andrew Kovalev.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
429 Castro St, San Francisco, CA 94114, United States
Lidia Yuknavitch with Chuck Palahniuk signing books after a sold-out reading at The Castro Theatre.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch at McNally Jackson Books.
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Lidia Yuknavitch with Jamie Byng at the Hay Festival.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch. Photo by Amanda Patterson.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch. Photo by Andrew Kovalev.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch with Jen Pastiloff.
Gallery of Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch with Nikita Stewart Henderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Monica Drake, Amy Padnani, Atsuko Okatsuka, Michele Selene Ang, and Storm Reid at the PEN America. Photo by Adam Amengual.
Lidia Yuknavitch with Nikita Stewart Henderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Monica Drake, Amy Padnani, Atsuko Okatsuka, Michele Selene Ang, and Storm Reid at the PEN America. Photo by Adam Amengual.
(Her other mouths is a collection of short fiction where l...)
Her other mouths is a collection of short fiction where language shoots up and through the body. Yuknavitch's stories leave questions like marks on the flesh of characters whose stories aren't pretty - they are raw, terrible, a different beauty than we've yet imagined.
(In interconnected and mutually enfolding texts protagonis...)
In interconnected and mutually enfolding texts protagonists face off with some deformation of being: psychological, sexual, political, philosophical. Plots play out across the body as if formed, deformed, reformed by culture. Drugs, violence, and sex inscribe the literal flesh of "figures" standing in for what formerly passed for the character. In these fictions, a woman is more likely to appear with a needle in her arm than a baby. Sometimes a woman cannot be distinguished from a man at all.
Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writings of War in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction
(Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war a...)
Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war.
(This collection represents a verbal cinematographer at he...)
This collection represents a verbal cinematographer at her best as she captivates the reader with a prose style that is mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous. With intelligence that scalds every pretense and surface, Lidia Yuknavitch's camera pans across subjects as varied as Keanu Reeves and Siberian prison laborers. She zooms in on drug addiction, crime, sex of all flavors, trauma, torture, rock-and-roll, and art, all the while revealing untried angles and alien shapes. She traces the inner lives of characters teetering on edges-death, birth, love, understanding-but never flinching at the spectacle of their violent descent.
(In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly mov...)
In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman’s developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.
(Ida needs a shrink or so her philandering father thinks, ...)
Ida needs a shrink or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, whom she nicknames Siggy, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals engage in "art attacks." Ida’s in love with her friend Obsidian, but when she gets close to intimacy, she faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly film Siggy and make an experimental art film. But something goes wrong at a crucial moment - at a nearby hospital, Ida finds her father suffering a heart attack. While Ida loses her voice, a rough cut of her experimental film has gone viral, and unethical media agents are hunting her down. A chase ensues in which everyone wants what Ida has.
(In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American phot...)
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: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds - east and west, real and virtual - collide?
(The feeling of not fitting in is universal. The Misfit’s ...)
The feeling of not fitting in is universal. The Misfit’s Manifesto is for misfits around the world - the rebels, the eccentrics, the oddballs, and anyone who has ever felt like she was messing up. It’s Lidia’s love letter to all those who can’t ever seem to find the "right" path. She won’t tell you how to stop being a misfit - quite the opposite. In her charming, poetic, funny, and frank style, Lidia will reveal why being a misfit is not something to overcome, but something to embrace. Lidia also encourages her fellow misfits not to be afraid of pursuing goals, how to stand up, how to ask for the things they want most. Misfits belong in the room, too, she reminds us, even if their path to that room is bumpy and winding.
(In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth...)
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin. Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unites to dismantle his iron rule - galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one - not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself - can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
(The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are...)
The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held - and told - by our own individual bodies.
Lidia Yuknavitch is an American award-winning author whose most known books are The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water. In addition, she is the founder of the workshop series Corporeal Writing.
Background
Lidia Yuknavitch was born on June 18, 1963, in San Francisco, California, United States. In her childhood, her father abused her and her sister verbally, physically, and sexually. Her mother suffered from alcoholism and didn't look after girls.
Education
When Lidia Yuknavitch was a teen, a caring and methodical coach noticed her and helped her to become a competitive swimmer. Then Yuknavitch's family moved to Florida, and at that very moment, Lidia began abusing alcohol. After graduating from high school, Yuknavitch moved to Texas and attended there Austin Community College on a swimming scholarship. During her studies at the college, she worked as a receptionist at the University of Texas at Austin. She planed on qualifying for the Olympic Games but ended her swimming career because of the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, as well as her own drug and alcohol abuse. After losing her scholarship, she moved to Eugene, Oregon and began her studies at the University of Oregon. She studied literature and reviewed the Two Girls Review there. She received a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oregon.
Before becoming a bestselling author, Lidia Yuknavitch did lots of jobs. She worked on an all-male house painting crew and on the road crew with Mexicans, as well as did seasonal farm work like picking basil and fruit.
Yuknavitch tried herself as a writer when she collaborated with Ken Kesey and other writers such as Robert Blucher, Ben Bochner, James Finley, Jeff Forester, Bennett Huffman, Lynn Jeffress, and others on the novel Caverns. But the key reason for beginning her writing career was the death of her newborn daughter in 1996. Her first book, Her Other Mouths, was published in 1997. This collection of stories is a collision between language and the body. Slowing down to gaze unflinchingly at the wreckage, her stories examine the wounds inflicted by need, desire, rage, and stifled communication.
Among her most known works are Allegories of Violence (2001) - a critical book on war and narrative, the memoir The Chronology of Water (2011), Dora: A Headcase (2012), the introduction of which is written by Chuck Palahniuk, The Small Backs of Children (2015), The Book of Joan (2017), and The Misfit's Manifesto (2017) - a book based on her recent TED Talk. In her acclaimed novels and memoir, author Lidia Yuknavitch navigates the intersection of tragedy and violence to draw new roadmaps for self-discovery. In all of her work, sex, violence, and art are inextricably linked.
For example, in the national bestseller The Small Backs of Children, much was made of Yuknavitch’s formal experimentation, especially the text’s use of hybrid forms: some scenes are presented as dramatic scripts; the verse is inserted in prose; one chapter consists of two columns of text to be read, somehow, simultaneously. But the genuinely subversive and challenging aspect of Yuknavitch’s work is her foregrounding of the body, and especially her presentation of sex. Yuknavitch forces us to see the body in all its physicality, its flesh and fluids, and excretions, and she depicts scenes of sex, including fetishistic and sadomasochistic sex, that are brutally visceral. Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.
Dora: A Headcase is Yuknavitch's novel about "Dora", the subject of a famous case study by Sigmund Freud. In 2014, the book was optioned for a movie by Katherine Brooks. Her recent book is Verge (2020), a new collection of fiction. Her work also appeared in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It, Wreckage of Reason, Forms at War, Feminaissance, and Representing Bisexualities, as well as online at The Rumpus. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing where she teaches both in-person and online. She also taught at Mt. Hood Community College.
(The feeling of not fitting in is universal. The Misfit’s ...)
2017
Views
A powerful and compelling speaker, through humor and compassion, Lidia Yuknavitch inspires audiences to find beauty in the challenges of being an outsider and shares how embracing her own misfit identity helped transform her into the revelatory writer and speaker she is today.
In her workshops, as in her writing, she embraces the misfit, shifting that character - as she has in her own life - from outcast to center stage. Her novels and memoir reflect the archetypal outsider and heroine and introduce readers to new constellations of self-discovery.
To her, art is the most profound form of expression because it integrates the body, experience, intellect, and the senses. It is the most holistic and therefore the most precise way of articulating our humanity.
She was inspired by Ken Kesey (with whom she collaborated on a collective novel project at Oregon University).
Yuknavitch's perfect reader is the one who is hungry, unflinching, and seeking something that rearranges him from the inside out.
Quotations:
"Words carry oceans on their small backs."
"We live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out."
"Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order… It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common."
"I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me."
"I’ve noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers, in particular, are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe."
"I just want my stories to be mine."
"I am trying to put things into the world that alchemize the dark, and turn it to something beautiful."
"Join the revolution. Don’t sit and watch. Make art, challenge, help. We’re killing our daughters. It’s perpetuated by TV, books. It’s my job to agitate."
"My home life in my teens was claustrophobic, abusive, a horror. Simultaneously, I was not fitting into any group or clique at school. My only safety was aloneness."
"Quite often, misfits turn into artists of one sort or another. Making art is the most intense form of expression available to humans, and it is a real place where a misfit can not only exist but also find community without judgment."
"Art is a kind of cultural medicine. Sometimes, for example, when you give juvenile offenders a canvas or a blank page or a musical instrument and let them access self-expression, their self-destruction begins to change and even fall away. Not always, but sometimes."
"I think gender and sexuality are territories of possibility."
"I think the space of making art is freedom of being."
"I believe in art the way other people believe in god."
Personality
The books Mean by Myriam Gurba, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley which never leaves her bedside table.
If she could own any painting, it would be any by Joan Mitchell.
Quotes from others about the person
"My goddess author." - Cindy Cunningham
"Lidia Yuknavitch is astonishing." - Kelly Link
"What Lidia is known for, besides all of her accomplishments, is being an extremely generous teacher. She is genuinely free with advice and gives of herself in a way I’ve rarely experienced. She wants to start a revolution and bring a bunch of artists along." - Kirsten Larson
"I've never had a bad thing to say about Lidia. She's an amazing writer, professor, and woman."
Connections
Lidia Yuknavitch is married to Andy Mingo. They have a son, Miles. Every day since her son was born has been the best day of her life.