Her Kind." />Hawthorne’s Lidia Yuknavitch (left) and Portland author Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen, share a free-ranging conversation on the literary site Her Kind.
Nobody needs another madwoman in the attic: A conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch and Vanessa Veselka
Posted by Rhonda Hughes on 04 Sep 2012
Here’s just a peek at this conversation. If you want to read more, go to Her Kind.
Lidia Yuknavitch:From my point of view, and I’m not shy about saying this LOUDLY, I think some art, books, music, film, could ONLY be made by women. The exploration, discovery and questions that a woman has, as well as the processes by which she makes art, from my point of view are fundamentally different than non-women modes – with the possible exception of Walt Whitman. Ha.
If we put the question of “essentialism” aside for a moment and just talk about being practicing women artists, I know that the kinds of aesthetic questions I’m interested in and the kinds of characters I create and the kinds of strategies I employ in writing have at their center what used to be called “women’s ways of knowing.” That phrase lost its hipness value over time, but it doesn’t change the importance of the idea.
Another way to look at the question, and one that I take delight in is to ask: Could a man or anything not a woman have written The Lover? Or Frankenstein? Or Empire of the Senseless? Or Zazen? My answer is a big fat no. And those books I listed all have gigantoid HUMANIST plots and questions – not just confessional or pigeonholed “womeny” issues.
Well?
Hawthorne Books craves your comment. We ask only that you keep it civil, and mind your spelling and grammar.