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Portland-based author Lidia Yuknavitch is a prolific writer of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. Her memoir The Chronology of Water (2017) is considered a classic of the genre; her novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children are both best sellers. Her other works include The Misfit’s Manifesto and Dora: A Headcase, and she is the recipient of multiple awards, including two Oregon Book Awards. Her new book, Verge (Riverhead, February 4, 2020), is a collection of short stories, many of which are set in the Pacific Northwest.
The stories in Verge swim with ravishing sentences, and swimming is an apt metaphor because Yuknavitch’s long and multifaceted history with swimming shows up all over her writing. It’s there in water imagery, it’s there in characters who endure, it’s there in the literal text that seems like it’s moving and breathing.
This collection is overflowing with meaty themes of forced containment, liminal spaces, and the mess of humanity. Bodies are everywhere. You’ll feel it in your physical being. It will not be comfortable. But you didn’t come to Yuknavitch’s work to be comfortable; she is demanding, and thank goodness.
Lidia Yuknavitch spoke with Sarah Neilson about living in the margins, queerness, how the Northwest landscape influences her work, bodies in motion, and being a book bitch.
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You have lived in many places, but you’re from the Pacific Northwest and you’ve been based here for many years. In Verge, the Pacific Northwest landscape, its cities like Portland and Seattle, even its wildlife, show up in many of the stories. How does living in the Pacific Northwest influence your work?
At this point in time it’s a part of my body; my relationship to the Northwest is literally part of who I’ve become as a person. It impacts me in terms of light and rain and water and greenness and mountains and ocean. Those elements of the natural world have become part of who I am rather than just, “Hey, there’s a setting I visited, or some trees.” The natural world of the Pacific Northwest has made its way into my understanding of physically being in the world. And so when it enters my storytelling, it enters as more than a setting. It enters as a habit of mind and a structure of consciousness and a kind of way of being. I don’t know if other people read it that way, but you asked me how it is for me. On the writing end, that’s how it feels.
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You run a writing center called Corporeal Writing in Portland. Swimming is a big part of your life, and that shows up in your work in water imagery, as well as more literally in characters who are swimmers (whether by choice or necessity). As an athlete myself, I’m always interested in how other writer-athletes reckon with the corporeal on the page. I always think about Natalie Diaz’s writing about the poetry of the body, and even Carolyn Wood, another Portland-based swimmer and writer, when I’m reading writers who have known their body in a high-performance athletic capacity. That’s a specific kind of knowledge to have about your physical being. How does sport and movement inform the way you write?
For me, moving towards swimming competitively was a little bit different, in that I never wanted to be an athlete. I never sat and thought, I’m an athlete, I want to be an athlete. But swimming was an absolutely clear, direct path out of my home life, and I happened to be very good at it. I didn’t have some strong desire to be good at it. That came a little later after I did it for a while. I think the strongest impulse in me that has to do with swimming wasn’t so much about sports, but it was about survival and endurance and strength and resilience, and a way out from what I was experiencing as a horrible childhood. And I’m not saying I didn’t have any ideas about athleticism or sports because by the time I was in college and even in high school, I was competitive.
I was an athlete and I did understand that. It’s just, I don’t think those were my earliest strong, imprinting feelings about it. But later, in recognizing that I was a competitive athlete, even in that case, what I felt proudest of was that I could withstand, or survive, or be strong, in the face of what I perceived to be abuse coming from my father. And he was not a good swimmer. The piece where I did care about winning metals and winning races and dreaming of things like the Olympics happened in a very small window from the time I was maybe 16 to 19. And that was the year we didn’t go to the Olympics for political reasons.
So that piece that other athletes feel, that I was starting to feel, got immediately killed. It matched up with how things I loved could be destroyed by people in power; first at home and then in the larger world. I guess I’m just trying to describe how my being an athlete might be a little different than other people’s being an athlete, and I don’t have the athlete feelings at all anymore. I still swim, I swim a lot, but those feelings dropped away immediately. Swimming turned into different things at different times in my life. Now it’s like this meditative space, because I’m 56 and yeah, I could do triathlons except I can’t run. I’d probably give myself a black eye, cuss my group or something, and I thought a lot of times about joining masters swimming. But swimming for me has just become this thing completely away from sports or away from athleticism. It’s more like meditation.
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That’s really beautiful. And I don’t think that that’s different from other athletes actually, because at a certain point you can’t compete at the level where you’re going to be at the Olympics for example. I think people’s relationship with sport definitely changes. And maybe they wouldn’t call it sport anymore, like what you’re saying.
Agree, agree. They sort of fold it into their lives. Even as a kid, I understood at age six that was my ticket out. And I would take a long time getting dressed in the dressing room, try to extend the workout time so I wouldn’t have to go home.
I am absolutely devoted to the liminal space, the spaces in between. More than half the stories occur in a hallway, or an alleyway, or one room, or the space between buildings, or an incarceration space, or the moment before. And so that liminal space is before culture sucks the story into what culture needs it to be to sustain itself. That liminal space is where all possibilities are still there. Even in the most dire spaces, like the jail cell.
Let’s get into the stories a little bit. Many of the stories in Verge explore the theme of incarceration, or forced containment. In Cusp, a teenage girl watches a prison being built outside her window, then enters it; in Drive Through, the protagonist is in their car as a homeless person knocks on windows, calling into question who is in what kind of prison; in Organ Runner and Second Language, girls and their bodies are exploited, pointing to the ways in which society either literally or figuratively imprisons. Can you talk a little about this theme in your work?
It’s a huge theme for me for many reasons. I’ve had experiences in terms of mental health and in terms of being a troubled youth in and around the punitive, or breaking rules, and breaking laws. I’ve had experiences in those realms, and also I teach workshops where I talk about writing and art in populations who identify as being contained or incarcerated — in jails and prisons and rehab centers and juvie realms. So the theme itself is literal to me, both in terms of my own past and troubles, but also in terms of the people we like to forget exist who are living in different forms of containment. Narratives get placed upon them, like the kids in cages who are refugees, narratives get placed upon them that are political, but the stories of who they may be as humans seem to drop away.
Another example in the book is the story Second Language that’s about a sex worker. I remember just being so filled with rage when I was writing that story because what was in the news at the time was the sex abuse allegations against Trump. There were some stories floating around about Eastern European minors he may or may not have been with and pee and sex-capades. And what was filling me with rage was that the stories of these actual girls and their bodies were no part of the story. Their subjectivity and their experience never made it into the news or into any story. That’s another form containment or incarceration, that the story is never yours. That you’re boxed into this status where you’re the material for somebody else’s story that’s bigger and more important than you.
You might say that every story in the book has a little version of this theme you’ve identified. It’s super important to me personally. It’s important to me in terms of the work I do in the world. And it’s playing out right in front of us that all over the world, people who are pushed into jail cells or cages or psych wards or areas where they can live or not live, they don’t get the story. They don’t get the light shined on the story.
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Throughout the collection, there are stories with the title A Woman ____ — A Woman Object (exploding), A Woman Signifying, A Woman Refusing, A Woman Apologizing, A Woman Going Out. Each of these stories shows the reader a woman doing exactly what the title says, but in what might be considered an unexpected way. Can you talk about the inspiration behind this series of stories and how they came to be in the collection?
My life! What I mean by that is that I just got really attracted to the idea of the debates around right now about the likable or unlikable woman character. All the women I know experience their own un-likability on a daily basis. We all do weird things all the time. I got attracted to the idea that there were these women, or even a woman over the course of one life, but I think you could read it either way — that it’s a bunch of different women or it’s one.
These women are kind of captured in a snapshot narrative right before they are about to do something either stupid or good, healthy–about to make a good choice. But that moment right before a woman follows through on something that could change her life could result in some giant shift. We experience those moments all the time. And they’re neither heroic nor villainous. They’re just weird, those things that women do in these little blips or little bomblets. Little bomblets of woman on the cusp of something, they reveal that women are complicated and contradictory and have warring impulses inside themselves. And they’re much more interesting than a tidy heroine or unlikable woman character.
Those women interest me. Those are the people I know and love. That’s who I am. We’re not tidy, polished, mainstream characters who make beautiful heroines. We’re a mess a lot of the time. That’s beautiful to me too. I’m not really interested in the beauty of Kim Kardashian. I’m interested in the beauty of complicated, contradictory, strong, intelligent, creative, messed up women.
Individual people who are gay or straight or lesbian or trans or non-binary are the individuals have been important people in my life too. They’re where I learned to cook and where I learned to have sex and where I learned to clean a house and where I learned how to wear pretty clothes. I didn’t learn it from my mother or my family or my father or the places wherever everybody else learns it.
.Yes, me too. In the story How to Lose an I, there’s a line that I think so beautifully captures much of what’s at the heart of this collection: “He catches himself looking at the back wall of his hotel room for a way out, but all he sees is the mirror.” Reading Verge, I was struck by how much the characters are their own way out and also their own immovable wall. That ties in with the title; “verge” which implies being on the brink of something, on the outer margins or borders, and also implies movement, to tie back to the second question. What is it about the margins that appeal to you as a writer? Do you see your characters as occupying liminal spaces, and how are they mirrors of themselves and the worlds they live in?
Oh, you just nailed it. You just hit it. I do write about characters who live in liminal spaces because I am uninterested in the story of the center filled with false heroes and heroisms and the idea that something’s going to come in to save us. I literally have zero interest in those people, or stories of those people, or movies of those people. I am absolutely devoted to the liminal space, the spaces in between. More than half the stories occur in a hallway, or an alleyway, or one room, or the space between buildings, or an incarceration space, or the moment before. And so that liminal space is before culture sucks the story into what culture needs it to be to sustain itself. That liminal space is where all possibilities are still there. Even in the most dire spaces, like the jail cell. That’s a liminal space, but profound change has occurred there as we know from people who have come out the other side and showed us something about ourselves.
Homeless realms are liminal spaces where I myself have met the same people that we meet out in the world. I met doctors, I met lawyers, I met athletes, I met teachers, I met good people, I met shitty people whose lives once fit the mainstream story of culture, and then they slipped out for a variety of reasons. So you hit it when you said liminal space, that’s like the jam for me. I wrote this in my book The Misfit’s Manifesto: The edges of any culture are what give the center a shape. If those edges didn’t exist, what we think of as the center of any community or culture would be an amoeba. It would be bleeding out all over the place and at war with itself, shape-wise. But the edges begin to give a shape to an entire community. And so why can’t those be the story? I guess that’s my question in the book. Why can’t this be beautiful? Even though it’s difficult material, the edges are beautiful to me, too.
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I’m really interested in the queerness of these stories. Many of the protagonists are queer, one is explicitly trans, and they are all living complicated, messy, beautiful, painful, full lives. This is still so rare to see in literature. But beyond the specific identities of the characters, to me, queerness in a broader sense is about fucking shit up, breaking rules, pushing boundaries, questioning everything — which is also what your writing does. I’m curious how you see queerness informing your writing and writing process?
That’s a true compliment to me. Thank you for noticing that. My sort of orientation to queerness has to do with my lived experience. I’m a bisexual person. However, the nomenclature has never felt quite right to me. And so the categories and the labels aren’t as profoundly important to me as the lives and experiences of people in the queer identity. My first intellectual understanding came from a mentor of mine, Kathy Acker. Meeting her and working a little bit with her instantly communicated to me. It went straight into my body that queerness was punk.
Punk is what you’re talking about. Punk is the verb that agitates the comfort culture and capitalist culture. And so from my earliest understandings of my own sexual identity and orientation, but also my intellectual and creative identity and orientation, I understood punk queerness as the agitation possibility for all of human experience. And individual people who are gay or straight or lesbian or trans or non-binary are the individuals have been important people in my life too. They’re where I learned to cook and where I learned to have sex and where I learned to clean a house and where I learned how to wear pretty clothes. I didn’t learn it from my mother or my family or my father or the places wherever everybody else learns it. Some of us have found identity formation inside a community that, again, has been pushed to the edges culturally.
I just wouldn’t be alive at all in terms of my individual life, but also our cultural existence, [without queer folks]. That’s where my allegiance is, and it’s in every book I’ve ever written. In our current psyche, in our current moment, I think queerness is the way forward. But when I say that, I mean as a very large cultural motion and not so much the labeling of individuals.
And that’s something that’s super, super, super exciting to me because everybody’s kind of in despair right now because things are shitty, but things have always been shitty. How we pull ourselves out of despair is what’s important. And I think that’s one of the things that can pull us from despair.
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I find a lot of hope in that, too. Finally, it’s a cliché question, but I’m a book nerd, so I always want to ask writers who or what they’re reading.
I love Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks. I love Carmen Maria Machado’s new book, In The Dream House. It’s just groundbreaking. And I don’t say that very often because I’m a book nerd like you, but I’m also a book bitch. For me to say it’s groundbreaking, it has to be like phenomenal. Another beautiful book I read that was just so beautiful, it obliterated the word beautiful, is Ocean Vuong’s book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I’m still like, I just rub it on my face now hoping some of it goes into me.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer and book critic whose work appears in Electric Literature, LARB, LitHub, Buzzfeed, Rewire News, Seattle Times, and Bookforum among other outlets. She can be found on Twitter at @sarahmariewrote, Instagram at @readrunsea, and on her website, sarahneilsonwriter.com.