“My embodied experience is the container for sensory details, and when I ask my body questions, I can collect the details to shape a story,” says bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch, Guest Judge for our Personal Essay Competition. An introspectivist and powerful storyteller, here she shares the insights you need to write a poignant personal essay. What focus do your experiences have? How do you bridge your experiences to those of other humans? How can you wield your creative choices to write an impactful story? Read on to learn what Guest Judge Lidia Yuknavitch is seeking in a winning entry.
Your latest memoir Reading the Waves was just published earlier this year. What inspires you to write about your personal experiences, and how do you distill memory into a coherent narrative?
I love that word "distill." Distillation is precisely what happens when we sift memory through artistic practice. I begin with my body, though I know that practice does not work for everyone. For me, however, my embodied experience is the container for sensory details, and when I ask my body questions, I can collect the details to shape a story. In other words, when I ask what stories my shoulders are holding for me, those experiences have a focus, rather than just turning to the vast sea that is all memory. Or I ask, what is the distilled history of my hands? These kinds of questions bring the practice of art close to the body in ways that help me curate stories.
Writing personal essays and memoirs requires incredible courage and vulnerability. What challenges have you faced when writing about such difficult and private memories? And what lessons about writing have you learned in the process?
I used to agree with that sentence. A lot. But over all these years, I have come to understand that writing stories from one's life is not the difficulty. Private memories are not "apart" from shared human experiences. In fact, it may be that the opposite is true. In other words, maybe writing is the bridge between self and other, or individual and group. So when I write about something that may have happened in my life, I'm building a tiny bridge to the greater experiences of other humans. If there is courage and vulnerability there, it is worth it, because I am of the mind that this is how we keep each other from going under. This is how we extend love and mutual aid, to weave our stories together. The risk far outweighs the fear.
Having written both novels and memoirs, what is your approach to creative nonfiction and telling your own stories as opposed to a character’s?
Well, when you are working with a fictional character, that character can be anyone, they can do anything. When you are working with nonfiction, some doors are closed, or if not closed, locked. Your journey is a bit more narrow because you are recollecting — or distilling — experiences that have happened to you, not something you made up. Having said that, the forms cross each other all the time, merge, morph into each other. All storytelling forms involve creative choices around curation, composition, where to amp the tension, where to be quiet, what experiences matter most, least. So if I am writing about my mother and her drinking, or if I am writing about a daughter in a fairytale who is trapped inside a bottle with a message in it that has been cast out into the ocean, I'm dipping into the same artistic practices on the page even if the stories come out differently.
Your memoir The Chronology of Water has been called an “anti-memoir” for its defiance of writing conventions and traditional forms of a memoir. What is your advice for young writers seeking to bend writing rules?
I taught inside academia for 30 years, so my answer used to be, "learn the rules before you bend them." And that seemed to be pretty good advice. It worked for me, and it gave me ground to move from, rather than just making fancy designs in the air. I'm less sure about that advice now. I think I have a great love and loyalty to some of the art that has come before me, including rock paintings. Maybe now what I think is something like: find what you love from what we call the "past" and design what kind of relationship you want to have. What kinds of conversations you want to have. Who are your important ghosts, ancestors, art creatures, past, present, future.
What are you looking for in a winning entry? Any other advice for the writers, especially those who are new to writing personal essays?
Heart meeting art.