Photo Credit: Andy Mingo

Alumna's poignant memoir to become a movie

Life rarely follows a linear narrative. It zigs. Sometimes it zags. Just ask Lidia Yuknavitch—teacher, lecturer, and best-selling author of Thrust and soon-to-be feature film, The Chronology of Water—whose fierce and fragmentary form of storytelling took root at the University of Oregon.

Yuknavitch, BA ’89, PhD ’98 (English), attended Texas Tech on a swimming scholarship—her ticket out of an abusive home—but the universe had other plans. Interrupted by pain, tragedy, and substance abuse she lost her scholarship and dropped out, later returning to community college to salvage her grades before landing in Eugene in 1988, where enrolling at UO proved serendipitous. An undergrad at the time, she managed to garner a spot in a graduate course taught by celebrated author Ken Kesey.

“Working with Kesey was combination magical and weird and innovative and illuminating, and some of us felt like we were also getting this phenomenal chance to dip into history waters,” she says. “This person who was part of a movement and we were getting to swim around in that just for a second, it felt pretty dreamy. It felt like something real had happened to us.”

That year-long collaborative novel-writing experience lit a literary spark in her, prompting her to further her education.

She credits the birth of her intellect, however, to UO professors Forrest Pyle, Linda Kintz, Julia Lesage, and George Rowe.

“My god, they had, possibly more than Kesey, such a tremendous impact,” Yuknavitch says. “I thank them every day of my life because they turned on my brain! There’s a word I have in my heart when I think of U of O, and it’s gratitude.”

Yuknavitch would go on to earn her PhD in postmodern literature, studying the history and traditions, but Kesey’s lessons on drilling down deep and “getting to the heart of a story” inspired her to explore alternative forms that deviated from traditional writing.

“Linearity has always been an obstacle for me as an artist,” she says. “My mind and my imagination work by association by association by association. I spent a lot of years just feeling like, well I stink, I’m not good enough. I’m doing it wrong but early illuminations and encouragement about making zig-zag paths or different forms, different ways to tell the story, opened all the gates up for me.”

Encouraged by her teacher, friend, and mentor Diana Abu-Jaber, Yuknavitch poured her heart and soul into writing The Chronology of Water, her searing memoir that drew the attention of actor Kristen Stewart, who makes her directorial debut this year when filming begins on the Oregon coast.

“Likely, that early experience (with Kesey) propelled me toward even daring to imagine that I could tell stories because I was coming from a pretty traumatic and wounded place in my life,” she says. “Having that little dip into magic for a year probably flipped a switch in my imagination and it helped me dare to think that I could tell stories too.”

Once a competitive swimmer and Olympic hopeful, her intimate connection to water is a unifying metaphor that defines her life and work. It is the cornerstone of Thrust, her best-selling, decidedly nonlinear novel set in an unstable future where rising waters threaten to submerge the Statue of Liberty. Through water and across time Yuknavitch’s young protagonist Laisvė (whose name means freedom in Lithuanian) is a conduit of stories and carrier of meaningful things.

“I kept coming back to the water scenes as a strategy for grounding the reader because I was jumping around in time and space, a kind of system that’s made of objects that the reader can follow.”

Yuknavitch won the 2016 Ken Kesey Oregon Book Award for Fiction and the 2016 Reader's Choice Oregon Book Award for The Small Backs of Children, and the 2012 Reader’s Choice Oregon Book Award for The Chronology of Water. Other works include Dora: A Headcase, The Book of Joan, Verge, and The Misfit’s Manifesto. Her TED talk “The Beauty of Being a Misfit” has had more than 4 million views.

Yuknavitch acknowledges that her unconventional writing style can be challenging to read.

“I could probably write easier books, but Kesey said to me one time that books should happen to you. I read entertaining, accessible books, too, and I like them, but they’re not the ones I remember. They’re not the ones that changed my DNA.”

Yuknavitch currently teaches and conducts workshops in Portland at Corporeal Writing, the company she founded. She paints and writes, and she swims, which she says is more of a meditative practice now.

“The only state of being where I feel unburdened is in water,” she says. “It keeps me balanced and sane and helps me remember who I am.”

– By Sharleen Nelson, BS ’06 (news-editorial, magazine)