I am a card-carrying misfit.
~ Author Lidia Yuknavitch
Earlier this year, at TED2016, author Lidia Yuknavitch related her dream of becoming a writer as she struggled with profound personal loss and shame and self-abnegation. Her story is what she calls "the misfit's myth", which, she says, "goes like this: even at the moment of your failure, right then, you are beautiful. You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That's your beauty."
Take 12:45 minutes and be inspired today.
Since that time she relates in her TEDTalk, Lidia Yuknavitch has gone on to realize much success. She has published an "anti-memoir", The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011; paper, 2013); the novels The Small Backs of Children (Harper, 2015) and DORA: a Headcase (Hawthorne Books, 2012); three books of fictions, Her Other Mouths (House of Bones Press, 1997), Liberty's Excess (Fiction Collective 2, 2000), and Real to Reel (Fiction Collective 2, 2003); and a book of literary criticism addressing war and narrative, Allegories of Violence (Routledge, 2014). Her writings have appeared in numerous periodicals.
Yuknavitch's honors include the Oregon Book Award - Reader's Choice (2012) and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award (Poets & Writers); the latter is the award that enabled her to go to New York City to meet the publishers and writers she mentions in her TedTalk.
Yuknavitch is a member of PEN Center USA. This summer, on July 11, she appears at PEN Center's Emerging Voices Author Evening.
A resident of Portland, Oregon, Yuknavitch teaches writing, literature, and art and conducts a series of workshops, "Corporeal Writing Seasonal Series", designed to demonstrate how art-making can become a life practice.
Yuknavitch's Website is Corporeal Writing.
"Woven", Guernica, August 3, 2015
Alden Jones, "The Rumpus Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch", The Rumpus, July 13, 2015
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1 comment:
In watching your video on TED, The Beauty of Beung a Misfit. I wanted to thank you for sharing your experiences. What was it that made you change your mind about your self?
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