#lidia yuknavitch
Max Dupain, Spontaneous Composition, 1935
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“For me, the body is a real place. It is a place you go to, a place you inhabit. It is the fundamental setting of every experience you have. And it is sometimes a place you leave in moments of fear or crisis or grief or depression or pain. I am working toward creating art that happens to a reader in their real body. So, in each story I was playing with bringing the body out of its material circumstances, giving it a consciousness. Letting the body have its own point of view.
While writing Chronology of Water, I literally had that question taped to the wall above my desk. A little note that read, What if the body had its own point of view? And I don’t mean in the ye-olde-philosophical binary of mind/body split sort of way. I mean that we don’t often enough consider the experience of the body as equal to, or inextricable from, the experience of the mind. For instance, if you have a pain in your back for your whole adult life, we don’t ask often enough what story lives there. And what is your spine trying to tell you? I believe that we are all walking around carrying every experience we have ever had written on our bodies. Our physical bodies.
And in my work I want these bodies to signify—not as traditional characters—but as if those stories inside the bodies were, momentarily, activated.”
—The Body Is a Place: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
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