Part 15 (1/2)

After I left, my sister told me she buried it in her backyard, but I visited her a month later and saw it in the back of herhair and car crap I never confronted her about the lie But I never saw the box again after that, either It could be in the ground in her backyard

Or it could be so in her car as I'd co Whatever else she was, she was there

Morning I' for the pool They open, and I enter I shed my clothes The water is the color ofI have ever known When I dive in, all sound, all weight, all thought leaves I aain

Mother, rest I am home

Wisdom is a Motherfucker YOU DIDN1T ACTUALLY THINK I WAS GOING TO LEAVE you inside ular way, did you?

Listen, I love h Andy and Miles have pretty much rebirthed me And yeah I'm married With family

And I love women Sue me

But there are other wisdoms

Unfortunately, I am not wise I don't have a special look back on your own life wise voice More often than not, all I have is a wise-ass voice, and people get tired of that, I can tell you Although I aes when needed

Up until the place in nant woht the whole story was about s that have happened to the Lidia

But what happens to you when you swih your own past is that you find an endwall The endwall for irl I learned it at the surface of h rituals of pain and pleasure

So here's the deal About fale women and their children who are families Gay men and women with kids who are families Bisexuals and transsexuals who family up all over the place People who don't have partners create families in everyone they touch I knoomen and men from a multitude of sexual orientations without any children just doing their lives who create families that kick the can down the street The heterosexual trinity is just one of oes busto, make up a different you If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one Look at all the people there are to choose froet on the bus Like now

I' I think you have to break into the words ”relationshi+p” or ”et me started on the current BAR PEOPLE WHO LOVE EACH OTHER FROM MARRYING fiasco Annie get your gun Jeez Anyway The key is, make up shi+t

Make up stories until you find one you can live with

I learned it through writing

Writing can be that

Writing to bring the delicate dream to the tips of words, to kiss them, to rest your cheek on them, to open your mouth and breathe body to body to resuscitate a self

Make up stories until you find one you can live with

Make up stories as if life depended on it

Though I admit e, I can say it in a sentence now: irl, I died

So when my child died in the woirl Ideal to make a sentence

The line between life and death

It took hter You have to forgive women like me We don't know any other way to do live than to throw our bodies at it I was the kind of worenades and whose life becairl I was and the girl I had -tiny daughter dolls - safe frory, or naive, or self destructive, or h these life stories at tis can so to tell you the ”truth” of a wos that happen to us are true

The stories we tell about it are writing A body away fro-with its for desires, its on and on

Listen I can see you If you are like me You do not deserveI can offer you Whoever you are Out there As lonely as it gets, you are not alone There is another kind of love

It's the love of art Because I believe in art the way other people believe in God

In art I've ood co and music and filh I' out of my asshole when I say this

Come in The water will hold you

Intervieith Lidia Yuknavitch RHONDA HUGHES, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR FOR HAWTHORNE Books, conducted this intervieith Lidia Yuknavitch

RH: Your rief process It is so in the book, poetic, rich iery, lines that demand the reader speak therief into art, into literature, speaks to me It's one of the reasons I wanted to publish your work You write, ”Language is a metaphor for experience It's as arbitrary as the es we call memory, but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear” Can you talk a little bit about your experience recreating ords this time in your life?

LY: You know Faulkner said, ”Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief” The same quote has been attributed to him about pain

I'e You can say, I was so sad I thought e always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience The best we can do is bring language in relationshi+p to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible Close enough to shatter thee close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises The ritual sense of language Or the cry

Poetic language - and by that I e, sound, rhythe to experience - poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation So after I nahter the day she was born, it felt precise torocks isthan to say, I was intolerably sad It feels precise to draw thatas possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did It's my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space

I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence Even if so I want the rhythe, the cry to reh this book and literally chart the e - to quote dickinson-goes strange

You have published both fiction and nonfiction Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role s occurred to me about both memory and about the relationshi+p between fiction and non-fiction

About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits - specifically his short-ter-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and bioches he'd done had been ”erased” from experience Part of me didn't believe it-I'd look at him and think, is the dark side of hirayto neuroscience, the , the es Every ti, you modify it a little bit and that's because brains-this is very cool - brains work through a s, words, facts, and fiction-all ”recollected” Eventually you are not re what happened at all, but your story or head movie about it The safest memories are probably those embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve theuistic choice you make forecloses others, directs the story a certain way, focuses on a particular iht have chosen very differently For to do with content in this sense So what is ”true” in non-fiction writing is also always ”crafted” - given shape and coh our narrative choices as writers And that's in addition to the science of memory So the true story is always a fiction This is why I have come to believe that non-fiction and fiction are as inextricably linked as ination - which, as it turns out, also use the same brain circuits when they are active

Sois - drawing fros I am absolutelyinside fiction writing The iinative real else in life that is difficult But I did find so this non-fiction book that truly amazed me I could address my mother and father as characters froine a prestory to them I could feel compassion for them And I can thank them for this life I have, as bittersweet a process as that is to h

Earlier yourocks One of my favorite chapters, ”Metaphor,” describes this as follows: ”The rocks They carry the chronology of water All things si and dead in your hands” Here also is your title What does the chronology of water o-when I was 26! Wait, was I ever 26? Man that see workshop with the wonderful Diana Abu-Jaber My daughter had just died, and I was a e toclassroo in co, I said, what? Water, she said She also said, I think this is a book I think it's the story of your life, rieving, fucking up

Later I pulled the story back out and looked at it You knohat? She was right And I thought, if this is the story of ot a y because that's how I feel about life-it's not linear It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an iy, it's the chronology of water - the ater carved the earth, the ater carries us into the world, the e are made of water, the ater retreats or comes I had, in other words, with her help, found my central metaphor