Lidia Yuknavitch Waits for Her Wave
"We’re getting a really good look at what the vacuum of idiots looks like."
Friends!
I’m writing today with some good news: after our midwinter sabbatical, Thresholds is returning in 2025 with sixteen episodes (maybe more) released in cycles of four. March marks our first cycle, so we’ll be releasing one interview every Wednesday this month before taking another little intermission and returning in the late spring. This new cadence is thanks to a partnership with the Black Mountain Institute— a literary hub in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute a few years ago, which meant that I lived and wrote there for five months, and grew very attached to the literary community BMI gathers and uplifts. A ton of Thresholds guests are BMI affiliates, actually, including Melissa Febos, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Kristen Arnett, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and more, so it feels good and natural to be teaming up with them formally. We are also excited to rejoin the LiteraryHub podcast network this year— a homecoming of sorts.
Today, the luminous Lidia Yuknavitch, whose work I have admired since her early memoir, The Chronology of Water, and whose novels (The Book of Joan, Thrust, Dora: A Headcase) have made her beloved. Water is a guiding metaphor for Lidia — she was a competitive swimmer in her youth— and her new memoir, Reading the Waves, meditates on the tidal nature of time and memory: how some events return to us over and over again throughout our lives until we learn to understand them (or read them) differently.
Lidia came on Thresholds to talk about menopause, that great midlife transformation, and the process it initiated of revisiting some of the memories she had been carrying and was ready to set down. But the conversation wandered as well to the wisdom she has earned in her years as a writer— and the necessary perspective she has gained on the role of the artist in society. The writer isn’t a solitary genius, she argues. "I feel like I'm just taking my turn as a writer on the planet, joining hands with other writers on the planet,”
"I'm not part of the idiotic ethos that's so prevalent in our country of individualism and exceptionalism and winning and being the best. I am instead choosing to lock arms with others who understand that we're just taking turns. What do you have to carry, and what do you have to give during your turn, and how is it intimately related to others?"
This is a way of thinking about creativity that isn’t so freighted with ego and anxiety— that you are simply one set of arms locking to others in a long chain of people trying to “move from the heart of experience,” to borrow Lidia’s words. These are good questions, I think:
What do you have to carry, and what do you have to give, during your turn?
It’s not a new idea [that writing makes us feel less alone] and it’s not earth shattering, except that it is earth shattering. Because what happens when we stop reminding each other of ideas like that about writing —or making art or moving from the heart of experience— is that other stories, by idiots, begin to fill the vacuum. Now more than ever (which is a phrase you could use in any epoch, because the now is always ever) we have to keep sharing stories of possibility and imagination and creativity and connectedness. Because we’re getting a really good look at what the vacuum of idiots looks like.
Another gesture I was inspired by during our conversation was Lidia’s impulse to reassure listeners that not everyone’s creative process looks linear or even consistent. She does not write every day, but instead trades off between writing, meditating, swimming, drawing, painting, “whatever makes sense.” She has learned to trust her own rhythms, insisting that "process-wise, I move creatively much closer to the anatomy of an ocean wave, and by that I mean that the storytelling and the imaginal and the ideas and the images are inside me, kind of, gathering energy like a wave before you can see it in the ocean. And I don't worry about how long it takes anymore. I just wait for the waves."
Tattoo it on my forehead: just wait for the waves.
You can listen to the whole conversation here.
In other news:
Thresholds alum Hanif Abdurraqib is heading out on a spring tour for his book There’s Always This Year. Catch him if you can!
We love this interview with
on our Lithub sister podcast, The Critic and her Publics.Do yourself a favor and watch the recording of this conversation between Thresholds alum
and Roxane Gay.
That’s all for this week! We’ll be back soon with episodes featuring Maya Binyam, Carvell Wallace, and others.
-Jordan
finally some good news!!