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audreyberalo-blog · 8 years

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Experiences of the Lidia Yuknavitch Q&A Session

The session started off with the talking of Yukanavitch’s new book The Book of Joan which comes out in April which already interested me when I first heard about it. I’m a little upset because I believe she asked if anyone knew about Joan of Arc but I must have been a bit too focused to realize it and answer before she said it would be homework to find out. In any case, it might not have been to my upbringing in religion, but my own research that I also fell in love with Joan and find myself enthralled with the same reasons that Yuknavitch is. The book apparently dislocates her from her time period and brings her to a time not too far from ours and she’s the only one who can fight against a world leader who wants to wage world war. She is very interactive in the session and we had a few laughs which I enjoyed, much better than a dry talking or meeting session. She mentions how normal sin/redemption aren’t always just good or bad, but rather she wants to know more about those who have made mistakes and what they do with their lives from there.

“I was writing to scratch people,” she says while making the cat scratch gesture, and I love this. I enjoy when writers are being sassy and honest and just pure. It’s nice to hear a person be open about themselves rather than just let things show from a surface. Instead of “generous” she would say her relationship with her readers would be “love”. And talks about “love warrios” and bringing back love into the discussion in an intellectual way. And her writing is a bridge now, a love warrior bridge which I think is an admirable goal. It’s nice when writers want to connect with their readers instead of simply trying to show them something.

“We need the young pissed-off voice” Anger isn’t a bad motivational and inspirational source. It brings out emotion after all. But the rage and irritated feelings are a transformation energy, take it and turn it into something, which is probably useful. I like how she wants to take the definitions of anger and love and “make them complicated again, instead of flat and stupid” it makes sense and I always loved looking deeper into emotions.

Apparently her heritage is Lithuanian and looked into Lithuanian fairy-tales and learned if they could make “anything” happen then she could take stories of sex and violence and also make “anything” happen. Which is a fascinating concept, why can’t we just take something and let it become something else? It feels like a technique that some people are afraid to practice in certain circumstances. She brings up how there is magic in reading fairy-tales aloud and I can believe that, I probably have felt that.

“For me, sexuality happens from birth to dirt.” “With a page I can go anywhere, with people I have to have boundaries.” Sex is one of the most intense things we will ever experience including love and death but society commodisizes it by making us think of it as simply as scenes from a movie and that is a violence, Yuknavitch while I paraphrase it. Strong correlation between sex and writing.

It was funny that her twitter and her cussing was brought up, but I also felt the same way. Also interesting to note that bombs are prominent in her writing. “BOOM” “Those of us who make art in the world are like little omelettes.”

Fragment writers were brought up, attempted to raise my hand proudly, took two tries. But placement is important for fragment writers to find how the pieces fit.

She mentioned how time being a linear arrow is something abandoned by physicists now and how we had a lot of movies feature non-linear time and I immediately thought of “Arrival” probably because I recently watched it. Spoiler alert, there’s a language where if you learn it then your perception of time changes in which the past, present, and future are all at once and not happening just yet. It gets confusing, but I’d say today’s world is confusing too honestly.

Ask not how do I analyze this poem but rather how does the poem still live in my present and how is alive differently, when you find out the answers it makes it more exciting, Yuknavitch says. I think i can agree with that, I always find it fascinating to find out how things might be the same or different depending on those who have studied it and their experiences and time periods from the origin of the work to the modern day.

Yuknavitch says that the reoccurring pain in your body actually helps tell the stories that you come up with and I find that really funny. Not that I don’t think it’s true, maybe the pain is where our heart and mind of creative writing truly come from.

Something Yuknavitch learned in jail “Our failures make us like each other” that’s definitely something to learn in jail. But these moments can help make you feel like the rest of your countrymen. Apparently the stories we have been fed about failures and successes are stories we have been fed and so we need to counter these stories she says, it makes me really wonder about the world in this fashion. That really we’re all alike and not so different.

“If you are able to write, you are a privileged muthafucka” And that sounds about right, not everyone can write, and not everyone can write freely. So, I think that in itself is amazing that we can and I feel like that really we all take it for granted every now and then, maybe most of us take it for granted for most of our lives.

All-in-all, I really enjoyed this session a lot more than I thought I would. There was a lot that I was able to learn, about the writer and about her work, and a lot I could relate to, like certain writing ideas and feelings. I also do like how she didn’t write every day because I’ve tried it and failed, nice to know that she’s about the same way. Rather I found that Yuknavitch writes about the same way that I do, “long pages and sporadic waves” because I write in bursts, sometimes not making much sense until I unravel and organize.

#theperformanceofbecominghuman #hwk

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