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Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes about Writing

All Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes Art Character Desire Fighting Memoir Strategy Violence Water Writing quotes
I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art. I'd say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I'd say art is a lifeline to the rest of us - we are out

I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art. I'd say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I'd say art is a lifeline to the rest of us - we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Art, Writing, Wish
Interview with Molly Gaudry, thelitpub.com. June 2, 2011.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Not Alone
Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.133, Hawthorne Books

I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Teaching, Writing, Ideas
Source: therumpus.net

These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered."

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Editors, Agents
Source: therumpus.net

Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?

Lidia Yuknavitch
Real, Writing, Heart
Source: therumpus.net

On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Doors, Entering
Source: therumpus.net

Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it gets bandied about a good bit) is that they don't write the "big" stories about "universal" or "worldly" concepts...Jesus. Um, when we do? We get told to get back in the kitchen and bedroom - go back to writing about love-y wife-y mother-y things.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Mother, Jesus, Writing
Source: therumpus.net

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Girl, Book, Writing
Source: therumpus.net

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Choices, Style
Source: therumpus.net

I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Opportunity, Doe
Source: therumpus.net

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Writing, Character, Desire
Source: therumpus.net

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