She has left 30 years as a university professor to teach in prisons and psychiatric hospitals, suffered abuse as a child, addiction to alcohol and drugs, gave birth to a dead daughter and became this writer capable of transforming wounded meat into literature with capital letters. And without ego. Lidia Yuknavitch: champion of the rare, living proof that love, art and water save us without baptisms. She was an elite competitor and swimming rescued her. He tells it in The Chronology of Water, edition of Carmot Press.

"I was ashamed to want good things," he says. Why? As a child I lived in terror and that fear made me feel useless. But when swimming began the change: in the pool I found a value. My body became strong. I could do something that my father did not. So the ingredient of my fear went from being shame to being anger. Anger propelled me away from home and writing allowed me to transform fear, shame and anger into an expression of myself. Although your father abused you, he transmitted his passion for art. Although her mother got drunk, she took her to swim. And swimming and art saved her. What a paradox, right? A huge paradox that I even try to honor. It reminds me that everyone has a shadow, failures. They gave me what they could and the harmful things they gave me are not mine. I am learning that the damage passes through me so that it becomes another energy. Is it strong? No. I have depression and anxiety. That said, we redefine strength as a desire to collaborate and not be the center. If so, I get closer. The idea that suffering makes you stronger is a myth that no longer interests me. Making art, making love, making community are generative acts that do not demand suffering. Are there lives that deserve more to be counted? But I suspect the stories of self-celebration. I am more interested in the hard art of creating bridges. As a body writer, do we have to leave my skin living to write? No, I don't think people should live to the limit to write, and it would be good to remember that there are people who have no choice in that of 'inhabiting' extreme experiences ... beware of idealizing them. Poverty and violence are extreme and I write to call attention to the bodies of children and women who have to carry these stories. I don't give a shit about the extreme or famous artist. I care much more about the emerging voices with their multiple experiences that are undermining the boring western and famous white author. There is a need for stories, which one is right if we can tell a thousand stories with the same experience? Maybe we need to reinvent understanding through conglomerate. Understand the layers to build something complete instead of putting all hope that we 'save' a single story. The history of power as the only organizational idea must be extinguished. If you don't like your family, look for other people "to recreate our origins in the image of that tribe," he proposes. And rewriting past opens the possibility of futures. From another of his novels, 'The Book of Joan', where transhuman beings are recorded memories in the skin. The issue is to set up new worlds. Young people against climate change, people of color, women, LGBTQ +, indigenous people are choosing to inhabit a new narrative space and we could say that they 'emerged' from previous stories (feminist science fiction activism has a beautiful history), but also 'arise' of their own volition at the right time of danger. They are the new species forged by our past into the future. No distance. Physics says it. Time does not travel linearly like an arrow and we may be witnessing our own birth. He has loved men and women, Kathy Acker! But he has only married men. Any thoughts on that? What were the only ones who asked me? I still love men and women. And who does not fit into these categories. But now he is with a man, they have a son and they live in a little house in the forest called 'sanctuary'. They look like the holy family. Do you consider it a betrayal of your defense against misfits? (Laughter). Counted like this, it certainly sounds as if it had reached a heterosexual middle class normality. Ha Looks are deceiving. My real life is more complex, like everyone's. I'm not in that house anymore, my son started the race and I live alone. Instead of normal, I chose to deconstruct continuously and, for example, I gave away the money from my first books to open the Oregon Corporal Writing Center for artists without resources. I quote: "The rehabilitated Catholics turn to movies to save themselves." When will the film of The Chronology of Water save us? No idea. The script is still in progress and I love being directed by Kristen Stewart. I can't forget the scene in which the dead ashes of her dead daughter are thrown into the river, the coat is stained and a fit of laughter enters. That black humor. Sometimes it happens, doesn't it? In addition, ashes are a good metaphor for compost: from the shit come the flowers, the food. I still have that coat by the way. I put it on and it makes me happy. "With Marguerite Duras lie in the bed of a foreign city, with Margaret Atwood you will learn to put your back straight, with Anne Sexton and Silvia Plath go to the bar to drink." With Lidia Yuknavitch? You will return to the water.Have you forgiven your father? No, but I don't believe in sin either. The best I could offer him before he died was to imagine his story in narrative terms. Push her back until he was a child. Just a child who deserved more love than he had. I can give him that. And it is enough.

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