ESSAYS
“What I am interested in is a collaboration realm where writing in community shivers the edge of self and social. What if we wrote and made art together in a room without a conclusion?”
An examination of our connection to the ocean
“I study crashing crests. In oceans. In people. In myself. It helps me not give up on myself or others. The ocean is so much bigger than a puny human, is why. You can release everything you are holding that is too much.”
“Olga’s house was the color of blood. Maybe it wasn’t, but in my memory, Olga’s house carried meanings beyond the ordinary range of things…”
"She tucked the corners of her face in and went back out into the world, knowing the red and blue trail her guts were leaving in the street behind her would repulse at least some people."
“Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.”
“What did it first mean to me, when I wasn’t even four years old and I’d leap into any water at hand, swimming pools, lakes, oceans, ponds, before I knew how to swim? I suspect it was simply wonder. Some form of imagination outside of me that I wanted to enter.”
CIVIC MEMORY, FEMINIST FUTURE: A PERSONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY FROM Lidia Yuknavitch
"Seventeen is the heat and sweat of Florida and the rush of hormones but my desires move toward other girls about to be women and I do not have a prom queen body or a Seventeen body."
ON BEING A WOMAN WRITER, By Lidia Yuknavitch
"Being a woman writer, I entered the vast stage of white with a woman’s body. Having carried life, I entered with a maternal body. Having loved and desired, I entered as a loving, desiring body."
THE UNSPEAKABLE THINGS BETWEEN OUR BELLIES, By Lidia Yuknavitch
"It’s taken me twenty years to make sentences of it. It’s a big deal to make a sentence."
EXPLICIT VIOLENCE, By Lidia Yuknavitch
"I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear."