Lidia Yuknavitch Tells Us

About Shapeshifting

Hello friends!

I’m so pleased to share another installment of the occasional series I do, in which I invite an author to tell us five things—not only about their most recent book, but about their life too.

I had the good fortune to meet the great Lidia Yuknavitch seventeen or so years ago when I joined her writing group in Portland. We immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits and became beloved friends, but even if I didn’t know her from Jack, I’d be a rabid fan of her books. The thing I say a lot when I talk to people about Lidia’s writing is she’s so fucking GOOD, but let me try to say more specifically why. It’s because she rings all the bells in my personal list of the five qualities of good writing, which are: clarity, engagement, dazzlement, enlightenment, and motherfuckitude. She goes all the way in all the directions that writing can go and she lets us swim there with her, alongside her beautiful, generous heart and her drop-dead brilliant mind.

Her new book is a memoir called Reading the Waves and when you read her interview you won’t need me to tell you that you need to get it immediately because it’s full of wisdom and beauty and love and pain and healing and wonder. It’s classic Lid. It’s so fucking GOOD.

xCheryl

Photo by Miles Mingo

Tell us about a time when you took advice that turned out to be really good or really bad.

I talk to water. A lot (ha). Mostly rivers and oceans, but occasionally, if no one is near me, even swimming pool water. Though I am suspicious of chlorine...Who knows what people think. Probably just something like “Oh there’s an old woman muttering to herself.” This is good. I feel like a new superpower has emerged in this part of my life: stealth mode.

In addition to the fact that my daughters ashes live there, I think the reason I feel comfortable speaking to the ocean is that I feel quite kindred with seals. They look like they are struggling when they are on land, scooting along on their bellies, flapping their flippers, stretching their neck muscles. But the moment they enter the water, my god. The beauty. The acrobatic wonder. The playfulness. I do not think I am as adept in the water as a seal, but I do feel a kindredness. I am not as comfortable on land as I am in water. In water I feel released from my own mass and bulk, from pressures to be beautiful or young or thin or successful. In water I’m just me. Fully.

So it should not surprise anyone that the best advice I ever received and followed came from a seal. I mean this literally, not symbolically or metaphorically.

On my 60th birthday, I bought myself a wetsuit. I’d been staring at the river that leads to the ocean outside the window of my home. I wanted to swim in the river, but I knew it was too cold to spend much time within. So I had a surfer thought, a seal thought. Buy a wetsuit.

Honestly the first time I put the wetsuit on I looooooooved it. I just wanted to wear it around all day. Like at the grocery store. Around the house. I wanted to sleep in it. Instead, I swam in the river.

This river water is also ocean water—the tides move in and out and turn the water brackish. Salt wetted my lips and made my hips extra buoyant. While in the water, I saw a large dark mass alongside me.

I had the same thought most people would have I guess, the theme music from JAWS made its way into my head, and a little tremor of fear rose in my chest. Because I was in water, I managed to stay at least a little calm, and I looked over through my goggles and realized it was a seal. My fear dissipated instantly.

S’up, seal.

She looked at me warily. Or he did. Doesn’t matter. Gender was nothing important between us.

That’s when I asked my question: so listen, seal? How do I age? What am I supposed to do next? Do I make my way to the ocean? Swim toward my own ending?

And the seal said, there is no ending. No beginning. There is only shapeshifting. And rolled on its back so that the sun warmed its belly.

Or maybe the seal didn’t say anything, the seal was just being all seal-Y. Who knows. I’ve been known to hear voices. Make up stories.

Anyway I already know this story. We all do. When we remember. Most “advice” is remembered over all time and space, shared between generations and species. So I rolled on my back and let the sun warm my boobies and belly.

My wetsuit a second skin.

Tell us about a personal transformation in your life or a change that you’ve made for the better.

I don’t know how everyone else feels about this idea, but lately I’ve been profoundly moved by something small inside the question of personal transformation and change. What I mean is, I’ve been meditating on and noticing the micro movements in my life, little non-events within daily living, small flashes or moments in the periphery of the drama of our lives. And I am certainly drawn to art and writing by people—living and dead—that zooms in on this smaller world. For example, Willem de Kooning’s idea that content is in fact tiny, not dramatic or large, or Virginia Woolf talking about “little daily miracles” or “moments of being” that are barely noticeable next to the big dramatic events in one’s life, which she hilariously calls wool.

So yeah. I’m more and more feeling intimate connection to the micro intensities all around me in a single day, a single hour. And that intimacy is yielding ten thousand micro transformations. Obviously I can’t catch all of them, but I can bring my focus to one or two here and there. Whether or not anyone else notices.

For example, last summer, a dragonfly flew into my room through an open window, and landed on my writing desk. Seriously you can’t make this shit up. Of course I thought it was beautiful. Blue-green luminescent colorings, huge wings. And of course I started up the magical thinking: "this magical dragonfly landed here just for me to make my writing more magical!" Three hours went by and it didn’t move. Was it dead? I devoted an entire day watching over this dragonfly. Later, while I was staring at it, I noticed it was vibrating. So I thought oh! Maybe it was just resting? That sent me down an internet vortex of learning about dragonflies.

I did exactly zero writing.

Among the first things I learned was that dragonflies lay their eggs in water and spend most of their lives in their larval stage. As naiads. Ever the woman attracted to water, this detail captured my attention. The rest of the day and night. Their adult lives are shorter than their larval lives, and their shapeshifting into winged creatures marks their ending.

The dragonfly on my desk never moved again. But something in me moved, mightily, even though no one would have seen it. Not some huge transformational moment, but something tiny. Spending a day with a dragonfly at the end of its life. Thinking about the span of one’s life, the elements, the conditions of being, the beauty, the hurt, the transmogrifies. And of course I went back to reread (a practice I find profoundly illuminating—rereading) Virginia Woolf’s The Death of a Moth: “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life.” Like my vibrating toward its own ending dragonfly.

I hope I’m vibrating as beautifully.

Tell us about your new book, Reading the Waves.

Reading the Waves performs the practice of rereading as a possible shapeshifting experience. By moving through fluid narrative streams—literally streams of consciousness—I am asking if there are ways to re-enter our own memories and rearrange the pieces so that we might change and grow. I am sharing a narrative space with others, those interested in shapeshifting both personally and relationally. I am learning to lay down with love some stories I have carried too long.

Tell us about a regret you have or a mistake you’ve made.

Oh good god. I’m woven through with mistakes. I’ve made more mistakes than whatever the opposite of a mistake is…I am a walking blunderpuss! Ha…but I do not mean that I am worthless, or that I should feel bad about that, so let me try to describe what I mean.

Like so many other people who are smarter than me and who have deeper experiences than I do, people I have learned from and been inspired by, I think mistakes are portals. Mistakes are how we learn, aren’t they? And they are like tiny thresholds—to be willing to risk failing or making a mistake is also to be willing to change and grow? To have a look at your own mistakes is to be willing to be all the way human.

I mean, there are a few doozies for sure (does anyone get out of this thing we call life without some fairly major fuck ups?)…like a DUI. Or getting fired. Or marriages that went busto badly. Or harms I caused without meaning to. Or letting down people I love. But I can’t go back and subtract whatever mistake I made, I can only go back, walk around the event, examine it from different points of view to see if anything shifts, opens, rearranges enough for me to learn something useful in my present.

There is a giant Sitka tree—a pretty old one—who knows how old, I've read they can live up to 800 years, so they are mos def smarter than us—next to my house. Sitka spruce are the ones with all those octopus-looking arms. Crazy looking deeply beautiful trees. This particular Sitka also has a bunch of broken branches, what look like tree scars on its trunk, it’s been ravaged no doubt by serious coastal storms and winds. I identify with this Sitka. I talk to it all the time. She or he or they hold my heart well. The stories I have to tell just don’t look or sound like other peoples’ stories sometimes, so why not confess to a forest. Beats the hell out of hiding in a little box talking to some dude in robes (early bad experiences with Catholicism).

Yesterday near the Sitka tree there was a herd of Elk. I took that to be something of a gift in place of answers to anything.

I also think mistakes and regrets are all tangled up in that complex thing we call memory. Like we carry these stories around in our bodies about our fuck-ups. Maybe too long.

I love this sequence by Joy Harjo in her book Poet Warrior, “At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.”

Yeah. THAT. I’d add: “and thank the story for helping us on our imperfect journey.”

Tell us your best advice.

When afraid, become a new story. Become a new creature. Conjure the new myths, new shapes, new voices and bodies. There may be journeys, but not just journeys. There may be carryings, transitions, silences, liminal spaces, circles, repetitions, returns, figures of being and becoming more profoundly powerful than achieving actions and knowing.

Lidia with Cheryl and Ursula K. Le Guin at Powell’s Books, 2014.

---

Lidia Yuknavitch is the award-winning author of The Chronology of Water, Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and The Misfit's Manifesto, based on her TED Talk, On The Beauty of Being a Misfit, with 4.5 million views. Kristen Stewart has adapted her memoir into film. She is the founder of the literary arts organization Corporeal Writing. She is grateful to have lived a life amongst other artists, writers, healers and activists who lead with heart. She is a very strong swimmer and hopes to become a seal soon.