'Stay Brave' with Lidia Yuknavitch
‘Stay Brave’ is an interview series by woman-identifying creatives for woman-identifying creatives to inspire bravery in the creative life. [Created and curated by Leah Umansky]
How do you interpret the phrase, "Stay Brave?"
The ability to keep your internal landscape and your external landscapes in intimate conversation. We are a sediment of otherness--we exist within larger existences.
As a woman-identifying writer, what are the ways that you “stay brave” in your life?
Working and collaborating in community with others. Meditating on my relationship to non-human existence. Swimming. Loving.
Who is someone in your life who models “staying brave” for you?
My son, Miles.
What writers, artists, and/or musicians do you look to to foster a sense of “bravery?”
Joy Harjo, Janice Lee, Rebecca Solnit, Terese Mailhot, Joan Mitchel, Christina Mcphee, Lori Lorion, Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Mary Shelley and Han Kang
What’s a piece of advice you would pass on to your younger self about “staying brave?” What’s something you know now, that you didn’t know in the past?
Brave is not achievements. Brave is being in relation to others.
Can you remember a time in your life where you realized your own bravery? How did you use it to propel you forward?
Yes, several. I have composted my rage into courage. I have transmogrified my grief into courage. If I stand near something larger than myself, like the ocean, and rage or wail into it, what comes back (eventually) is the will to live and help others besides myself.
What do you do when you aren’t feeling brave? What inspires you or motivates you?
I go to the ocean or to a forest or get near non-human animals or elements to remind myself that humans are one puny part of existence. Star gazing also works.
In what ways would you like to be more brave in your creative life?
I'd like to not care about the market at all, but a girl's gotta eat and feed her family...endless question for me.
What is your proudest moment of bravery?
Transmogrifying grief or rage. More than once.
What are you currently working on?
Shapeshifting.
Thank you, Lidia, for being our February feature. Happy Valentine’s Day, Readers! Lidia’s books, and her social media presence are always all about love.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the award-winning author of Reading the Waves, The Chronology of Water, and the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase. Her book The Misfit's Manifesto is based on her TED Talk, On the Beauty of Being a Misfit, which now has over 4 million views. Her memoir has been adapted to film by Kristen Stewart. She is the founder of Corporeal Writing. She is a very good swimmer.
Leah Umansky is a poet, writer, curator, writing coach, artist and teacher. Her new collection of poems is OF TYRANT out now with Word Works Books. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as PBS’’ ‘Story in the Public Square,’ The New York Times, POETRY, Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Minyan Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day and others. She is a writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on wonder, joy and love and a hybrid-memoir, DELICATE MACHINE. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
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