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Items of interest concerning Hawthorne Books and its authors

“The Story You Made of Me: An Interview Lidia Yuknavitch about Dismissed Narratives,” by Elle Nash for the Lit Reactor

21 Nov 2014|

Elle Nash:You are known for being a champion of owning your sexual/personal narrative in a world that tries to own it for you, from your body of work, to your workshops, to your work as a professor in helping others reclaim theirs. What motivated you to help others find their own voice?


Lidia Yuknavitch: Well to begin with, people helped me pull myself out of the gutter and discover an artistic path. I’d likely be dead, incarcerated, or just numb beyond words had key people in my life not reached out to me and shown me a canvas, a page. So I feel like my job in life is to return that favor.

Partly just from my life, since as far back as I can remember there was someone telling me who to be and how to be. I got the message early on that I was “doing” myself wrong. Everything I felt and everything I did somehow went against the grain of what those around me were prescribing.
In terms of non-fiction, there is a difference between shouting your self story all over everyone and making art.

Of course the “wrongs” were the false fictions of father, family, body, knowledge (what I was encouraged to know and not know and in what manner), sexuality, agency, girlself.

To read the entire interview, go to Lit Reactor.
But the other kind of motivation has come from being a teacher for 28 years (yes I’m old like dirt). Every year hundreds of bodies come through the classroom. Soldier’s bodies. Single mother’s bodies. Bodies emerging from incarceration or beatings or war or poverty. Bodies made up to look like magazines, when underneath there’s a truer self self-destructing. Bodies from countries not America and bodies whose ethnicities defy language. They all have one thing in common: none of them fit the available scripts or stories that our culture places on top of them. And when they have trouble conforming to those already available, socially-sanctioned stories, they can falter.

Like I did.

So that’s where my motivation comes from, largely. That’s why I keep doing what I do. I love the beauty of the faltering body in all of us. Our vulnerability is our greatest strength. I like to help people give voice to THAT.