The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [61]
An exchange happened. Woman to woman. If she is still alive, she can back me up on this.
Was it possible I had something to give? Out of the nothingness that was my life? Really, what the fuck did I have to give? Woman with too many holes in her. And yet there was something.
Words.
With this woman in me I went to my teaching job and talked to students about ideas. The ideas got into my heart some. And then my heart began to pump. The talking with students about ideas had a pulse. Some of them cared, some of them could care less, but it didn’t matter. I was so happy to get to stand in a room with words and ideas I would have talked to myself alone in a classroom. But I was not alone. I was with what youth should be. I was with artists and writers and scholars and bartenders and musicians and nurses and strippers and lawyers and mothers and some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who’d wronged us and everyone we’d been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.
Whatever it was or was not, there were words. Not just my own. I wrote stories, I wrote books, but the more I wrote the more I saw a door opening behind me, and I saw that if I jammed my motherfucking foot in it, more of us could get through. And that we could make things. Together. What we could make, was art. How that mattered. With other people I made paintings. With other people I made performances. With other people I made stories and readings and strange outsider art events like filling the trees with bras and little raw narratives or unbooting booted cars or hooking up free cable for poor people with a friend who worked for Bell or putting haikus about earthworms and cunts on the windshields of cars in corporate parking lots.
And I wrote my second book of stories.
The book that came out after the death of my marriage was called Liberty’s Excess. If you pick it up, you will recognize the stories. They are the stories of people trying to perform the relationships we’ve been handed as scripts. Daughter. Mother. Husband. Wife. Marriage. They are the stories of women and men who try to love and fail. And fail. And they are the stories of people who live at the margins of this thing we call culture, mostly fucking up, but some of us, aren’t we still here? For the ones who aren’t? I wonder, is it us that fucks up? Or the stories we’ve been given?
It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedoms will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one of your yous. It’s OK though. There are more.
How many times do we die?
Words, like selves, are worth it.
Gray Matter
I MAY HAVE BEEN A BIG FAT FAILURE AT MAKING A HOME, but I made up how to make something else in its place. Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse.
The first wordhouse I built was a literary journal. Now usually when someone says the words “literary journal,” you picture something small and white and pristine like Virginia Quarterly Review. Not that. The thing we made was huge. Nine-by-twelve perfect bound four color in your face. Counterculture. Every issue had a theme meant to deconstruct - my favorite thing I ever learned as a scholar - the “literary journal.” Themes like Obscenitydivinity. Blow. Varieties of Violence. Alien. At the helm were me and my smart as crap talented as fuck friends, exactly like a garage band except with