Lidia Yuknavitch Recommends...

“Mary Shelley and Louise Bourgeois. All I have to do, and I could do this every day of my writing life for the rest of my life, is open up Frankenstein to any page, or open up my book of Louise Bourgeois drawings, and my gut-heart-strum is activated. I’ve used single lines to enter whole territories of story, single images to chase characters. Endlessly. I turn to their work like a woman who gave herself permission to create a new lineage, a motherline-motherload lineage, where other women writers and artists and musicians make up a second world, body first. Where language and the image and the body are no longer divided from one another. A little bit I literally leave and step into their worlds, but don’t tell anyone or it’ll make me sound kooky. Just trust me: ‘I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.’”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books, 2012)