INTERVIEW: Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of Reading the Waves

Interviewed by Leslie Lindsay

Yesterday, I walked to yoga, something like two-and-a-half miles. On my way, I closed my eyes, let the sun filter through my milk skin lids. When I opened them, it was obvious I was passing through various segments of life, like a threshold. I took stock: a kidney-bean shaped lake, a copse of evergreens, a spillway. For 12 minutes, I watched the flow of water. In my yoga bag was a copy of Lidia Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves: A Memoir (Riverhead; February 2025), passages underlined, starred, pages flagged.

Typically, books in my possession stay pristine. This one is waterlogged, filled with motherwaters, and dripping with condensation. In yoga, the lesson was on…fluidity. I cannot make this up. Intellectually graceful and sexy as hell, Reading the Waves is at once elegant and brutal. A clear-eyed tell-it-how-it-is narrative, Yuknavitch interrogates what it means to grieve the past and shed the person we once were, while letting go of past people and places in the most mellifluous prose you’ll literally feel as if you’re being carried on a gentle wave with a lovely and attentive guide.

Organized in 15 titled, nonlinear, braided essays, Reading the Waves is a return and a cycle. It’s also a bit of a love letter to Virginia Woolf and Devin Crowe, Yuknavitch’s former husband, her son Miles, her current husband, Andy, her dead daughter, Lily, who resides in the ocean, and also Margurite Duras and Georgia O’Keefe, and maybe also Louise Bourgeois, and the Pacific Northwest, and trees and rocks. I cannot possibly list them all here because, words, letters, space, and water cannot contain them all.

This is a book about holding on and letting go. Mostly letting go. But you have to hold the book in water and land and in yoga class, meaning — in your body — for it to be effective. Yuknavitch writes, “I look for the places where stories and lives intersect, where the lines on the maps that divide us dissolve and shift.” The lines definitely divided yesterday. From land to lake, tree to trikonasana, this cognitively electric read emboldened me, like Tesla sitting inside his own work.

Leslie Lindsay: It’s always such a delight and honor to chat with you, Lidia. You are author of several novels, including most recently, Thrust, which I loved, and see as a bit as a fictional companion to Reading the Waves, but also, we can’t not talk about The Chronology of Water, which after it’s 2011 release, became a cult classic in terms of writing against norms. I’m pretty certain that book catapulted many-a-writers into this fluid, nonlinear storytelling style, including me.

This quote from Virgina Woolf, sums it up, “arrange whatever pieces come your way.” That’s what I’m doing in my new project, and what I think you do in everything you do, like arranging words and lines and sentences as one might shells at a beach or a gallery of photographs on a wall. Can you talk about that, please? The collaging aspect of your work?

Lidia Yuknavitch:Yes with glee! I am so happy to be in dialogue with you Leslie. Like word swimming together. I am so very moved by acts of arrangement and rearrangement. I mean, if you think about it, sentences are arrangements, poetic lines are arrangements, just as much as music or drama or painting — composition and arrangement mesmerize me. Especially if I let go of static forms and play with moving pieces around, as Wolf guides us. Which is why I am so very disinterested in plot. Or put slightly differently, I am only drawn to plot if we arrive by way of an array of sensory intensities.

So collage is an interesting concept to me as well — and even further, kaleidoscope. I mean fluidity, collage, fragmentation, kaleidoscope, all of those patterns and forms feel closer to me to my embodied experience than linear narrative seems to be able to capture on the page. I know I am not the only person who feels this way, and I also owe a great debt of gratitude to women and queer writers all around the world who were opening up these forms of storytelling from about 1900 on. I’m for them. I bow. And I consider it my responsibility to keep these forms dancing for all of you who are coming up next.

LL: With the ocean, which yes — I love immensely — I want to ask about two things: 1) how the title Reading the Waves fits into the narrative, what that means to you and 2) Toni Morrison’s quote on this concept of creative conjuring and how water has ‘perfect memory.’ These are big, tumultuous waves. The depth of this response, I realize, could go really deep. Let’s keep it surface-level.

LY: Fellow ocean lover, I salute you. Yes the title is definitely a bit of a kiss to Virginia Woolf, because The Waves and To The Lighthouse profoundly inspired and influenced me. But the title also gestures toward how we might loosen up — make more fluid — our interpretations of the events in our past that have marked us. This is why I keep questions about reading and returning, about interpretation and memory at the surface of the storytelling. Does that make sense?

Toni Morrison’s quote about water having perfect memory fucked me up. HA. Seriously. Because water is such a life force for me, so much the central metaphor as well as literal realm within which I am most alive, it felt both beautiful and terrible to think of water having perfect memory. Also how does that work! Water moves. It is fluid. Or it freezes, or evaporates — shapeshifts. Does that mean memory does those things too? I think that it does. But it is also a mind-blowing concept if one sits with the idea in meditation…all water has perfect memory…gah! I’m just a puny human! How do I get my mind to move through that idea without panic? I have to let go of my previous definitions and ideas about what memory is and is not. Plus I’d much rather sit around meditating on Toni Morrison’s singular lyric lines than, say, Wittgenstein. Yeah yeah I know. Big brain. Whatever.

LL: In the section titled “Daughter,” you mention how for the first time in your life you truly miss your mother. Mothers are complex as hell. Our relationships with our mothers are complex as hell, even if they are dead. Mine is dead. Yours is dead. But how they live somewhere in our bodies and our dreams and our gut.

LY: At this point I experience the word “mother” a little bit like I experience the word “water.” The word mother has opened up into thousands of meanings after writing this book. The word mother has prismed into waves and particles. So whatever my mother was or wasn’t, whatever our love for each other was or wasn’t, the word has been liberated back out into the ocean or the cosmos to shapeshift meanings where needed. And my own motherhood is undergoing some kind of transformation as well; some form of loosening and becoming sediment and array is happening, because I am going to be 62 this summer. I can feel it. I don’t want to miss this whatever-it-is. I want to notice. Experience. Maybe this is how I love my mother — recognizing I am part of everything around me, human but especially non-human, as I am approaching my return to existence.

LL: Do you want to talk about Devin? Let’s start with those lovely synchronicities of the etymology of his name, the place you met. The murmurations of crows.

LY: You know, Eugene, Oregon may be some kind of cosmic vortex. I remember Kesey saying that to me once, but I was young and witless so I just thought get outta town. But listen to this — my first husband’s brother played gigs in Eugene before I ever met him. My current husband and I walked by each other in the halls of the creative writing department, checked each other, and didn’t hook up until 2 years later in San Diego. So meeting Devin Eugene in Eugene seems bigger than Devin to me now…but anyhoo.

I was communicating recently with my friend Elizabeth Woody about the breakdown of a primary relationship, and she reminded me how lucky we all are to have relationships at al l— brief ones, long ones, human-to-human, human-to-animal, human-to-world or elements, because when we inhabit relationships we experience molecular exchange. Literally and metaphysically. So when I write about Devin, I now understand I am also writing about place, about birds/crows, about cranes, about death rituals, art, eros, the word Devin becomes ten thousand things. It prisms. Like water or mother. Whatever happened between us in terms of the play-by-play events becomes very faint. I think that is beautiful. And whatever pain emerged, it has begun is transmogrify. Probably from the start, before it even happened. All life is in process. All love. All death.

LL: Let’s shift and consider this concept of ‘where we’re from?’ I find this such a complex question. Are from where we’re born? Where we live now? Where we lived last? Are we a beautiful and broken conglomeration of all the places we’re ‘from,’ like a stone that’s been rolling around and around and around in the ocean, collecting sediments and minerals…and life? Can you speak into that, please?

LY: Ohhhhhhhhh but I love the way you just enunciated! Are we a beautiful and broken conglomeration of all the places we’re ‘from,’ like a stone that’s been rolling around and around and around in the ocean, collecting sediments and minerals…and life?” What a beautiful and expansive line! YES! The answer is yes. Ha…I mean, if we think of your sentence as a portal, a possible rearrangement of “I was born in San Francisco, California,” or “I lived in Eugene, Oregon” or my mother was from Texas — where we are from changes. Opens. Breathes.

LL: Do you tend to lean toward the abstract? Because I sure seem to! How can a writer be abstract when words are printed in black and white? How can a visual art practice, like painting, for example or photography support the writing process?

LY: WAAAAYYYYYYYYYY. My first drafts of things are very much like abstract expressionism. Which I have on occasion been told = unreadable. Ha. I don’t believe in a binary between, say, clear and abstract. Or representational (in painting) and abstract. For example, if I look at a photograph of a deep red-orange sunset, and then I stand in front of a giant red-orange Rothko painting, and I can “feel” the essence and sensory truth of sun setting from both, who gives a shit that one is more abstract? I think on the page, when people get very lyric or poetic, or they rearrange order as Gertrude Stein does, or stream-of-consciousness as Virginia Woolf did, they are inching nearer to sensory truth of embodied experience.

The pissy pants part of me wants to say clarity is for pussies, but even I don’t believe that exactly. It’s just not where I want to put my life and erotic energy. I think clarity is useful for some things. But I’d prefer to swim in the ocean and render the sensory experience with other kindred souls. It’s OK though. We need ALL the forms, all the styles, the wide messy varieties of art so that we can create connective webs of experience.

LL: The last section of Reading the Waves, titled, “Solaces,” I was swooning. Every bit resonated. Every bit made me want to re-story myself, which is because I am on a massive cusp of change. I shouted them out across the room to whoever would listen: “Your fields of possibility are everything! Mine has been art and water. What are yours?” Seriously. The people at Starbucks thought I was pretty weird. And then they laughed. What do these people at Starbucks need to know?

LY: OH MY OCEANS I love picturing you standing in Starbucks shouting these things! YES! They are meant to be incantations of a sort! These lines that get underneath our skin — I used those lines at the opening as flashlights — and I hope others find lines they can use as flashlights, beacons too…This made me so happy to hear. Oh good god now I’m tearing up. Gratitude my friend. So much love. May we cast all the spells.