“Beyond the Pages: Lidia Yuknavitch Reveals the Hidden Depths of ‘Reading the Waves'”
LL: Do you tend to lean toward the abstract? Because I sure seem to! How can a writer be abstract when words are printed in black and white? How can a visual art practice, like painting, for example or photography support the writing process?
LY: WAAAAYYYYYYYYYY. My first drafts of things are very much like abstract expressionism. Which I have on occasion been told = unreadable. Ha. I don’t believe in a binary between, say, clear and abstract. Or representational (in painting) and abstract. For example, if I look at a photograph of a deep red-orange sunset, and then I stand in front of a giant red-orange Rothko painting, and I can “feel” the essence and sensory truth of sun setting from both, who gives a shit that one is more abstract? I think on the page, when people get very lyric or poetic, or they rearrange order as Gertrude Stein does, or stream-of-consciousness as Virginia Woolf did, they are inching nearer to sensory truth of embodied experience.
