culture

Portland Author Lidia Yuknavitch Examines A Scorching New World

By April Baer (OPB)
Portland, Oregon July 3, 2015 7:47 p.m.
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Lidia Yuknavitch came by the OPB studios for an interview with State of Wonder about her new novel, "The Small Backs of Children".

Lidia Yuknavitch came by the OPB studios for an interview with State of Wonder about her new novel, "The Small Backs of Children".

Christina Belasco / OPB

This week State of Wonder spoke with Portland writer Lidia Yuknavitch about her new novel, "The Small Backs of Children," which publishes July 7.

Yuknavitch has a reading of her new novel at Powell's Books July 8.

On differences between her 2011 memoir, "The Chronology of Water," and the new novel:

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I think I went to school in "The Chronology of Water," and I learned how to go ahead and listen to lyricism or image, and abandon plot and linear time. Interestingly, I was writing "[The] Small Backs of Children" before writing "The Chronology of Water," and I hit this weird wall in my life and on the page. Like, “Uh oh, I’m not whole as a person!” I wrote "The Chronology of Water," almost as going back and getting pieces of myself. I was then able to write this weird, poetic image-based book I'd set out to write before that.

On how much of "Small Backs" was drawn from her own life:

I would say there are autobiographical elements in every novel. Yes, there are pieces from the story from my life and also my Lithuanian family history. I really had an uncle sent to Gulag for taking an illegal photo of a massacre that happened in Lithuania.

It’s like I had a giant box of artifacts and some of them were true and some were blue marbles and sticks and feathers. I put all of them together and made fiction.

On the lure of photography:

There's my obsession as someone who views it; and then I'm an amateur photographer and painter. I'm drawn to the image in every way possible. I'm a crappy photographer, but I'm better on the page, when I try to render an image. I got obsessed with those famous photos over history that made us look at things differently. And then I'm interested in the photographers that took those photos rather than rolling their sleeves up and trying to save a life.

There was the green-eyed girl from National Geographic. That one lodged in my imagination. That led me to be haunted by the images of women in war — it's like a white screen we project all of our identity issues onto. And the more photos we have the less we have to think bout how contradictory and weird our lives are.

When we think of war, we think of war as axiomatic of the soldiers' story, which is important and right. I just wanted
 to add to that story is that there are more fronts and more bodies affected. My big question is where are the purple hearts for the women and children who survive the conflicts we make.

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