2 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4 + 11
3:00-5:00pm ET
Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch is a highly acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead, 2025), whichwas praised by Booklist as “emotional and darkly hilarious,” and as "electrifying" by Suleika Jaouad. Her memoir The Chronology of Water has been adapted into a feature film by the actress Kristen Stewart.

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Come practice and play with me by reading, swimming within, and making fluid narrative shapes. I am the author of two creative nonfiction anti-memoirs, The Chronology of Water and Reading the Waves, both of which ask the question, why not let story loose to form new shapes of telling? As a human who has spent their entire adult life teaching exploratory art forms and collaborating in community at Corporeal Writing, I have some insights into not only how to deviate from traditional structures, by WHY.

"Never mind. Arrange whatever pieces come your way." As Virginia Woolf reminds us, non-linear narrative is not just a game to play but a mode of consciousness, being, and expression. The stories we tell about life--real or imagined--need not pledge allegiance to forms meant to erase us. We are the only ones who can invent the forms that speak a self.

Working with some key citations from Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jeanette Winterson, Clarice Lispector, Helene Cixous and Han Kang, and using those citations as flashlights, as I did in Reading the Waves, we will study and do generative writing around these structures:

Day One

• The use of the narrative lyric fragment

• Narrative Repetition, Echo Effect, and Recursion

Day Two

• Emotional Micro-intensities

• Arrangement, de-arrangement (and derangement ha), and rearrangement

Participants will come away with a strong practice and play experience and material they can use to:

• Create new storytelling forms

• Explore narrative braids, diptychs or triptychs, poems, plays, manifestos and spells. Ok kidding about spells. Sort of. Or not.

• Explore in-depth writing practices that liberate expression and meaning-making toward storytelling not inscribed or dictated by patriarchy. Feminist as f*ck.

To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, March 27.