“Beyond the Pages: Lidia Yuknavitch Reveals the Hidden Depths of ‘Reading the Waves'”
This quote from Virgina Woolf, sums it up, “arrange whatever pieces come your way.” That’s what I’m doing in my new project, and what I think you do in everything you do, like arranging words and lines and sentences as one might shells at a beach or a gallery of photographs on a wall. Can you talk about that, please? The collaging aspect of your work?
Lidia Yuknavitch:Yes with glee! I am so happy to be in dialogue with you Leslie. Like word swimming together. I am so very moved by acts of arrangement and rearrangement. I mean, if you think about it, sentences are arrangements, poetic lines are arrangements, just as much as music or drama or painting — composition and arrangement mesmerize me. Especially if I let go of static forms and play with moving pieces around, as Wolf guides us. Which is why I am so very disinterested in plot. Or put slightly differently, I am only drawn to plot if we arrive by way of an array of sensory intensities.
