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Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch

“As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.”

Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch

Author

Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch is an American author born in 1963. Her works are known for their profound emotional depth and unique narrative style, exploring themes of identity, gender, and human experience. more

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“The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.”

Humans Form Joy Bits Boys Struggle Crazy Serious Ocean Majors Rivers Strategy Brave Memoir Storytelling Instance Prose

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.”

Firsts Looks Self Moments Stories Glory Favors Memoir Grass Walt Leaves Of Grass

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now.”

Feels Kind Art Made Attitude Pieces Tired Productions Memoir Curious Artistic Engaged Mystical How You Feel Unicorn Life Attitude

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

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“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.”

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Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“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.”

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Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“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.”

Ifs Writing Wells Doe Form Opportunity Interest Cracks Junkie Love To Read

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged.”

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Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.”

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“I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.”

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