PORT TOWNSEND — The unconventional memoirist Lidia Yuknavitch will give a free reading at the Writers’ Workshoppe, 234 Taylor St., at 7 p.m. this Saturday.
Yuknavitch is author of 2011’s The Chronology of Water, her memoir chronicling her love of swimming as salvation, her relationship with an abusive father and a silent mother and her own loss of a stillborn daughter.
Water is about bodies and gender and pain, according to the Writers’ Workshoppe announcement, but more than anything it is about finding joy amid the mess of life.
Yuknavitch, who lives in Portland, Ore., will also engage in a conversation with the audience and Writers’ Workshoppe owner Anna Quinn during Saturday’s event.
Yuknavitch is also the author of Dora: A Headcase, a novel she calls “a love letter to nerds, misfits, introverts and arthearts everywhere.”
In it she writes: “You know what? Seventeen is no place to be. You want to get out, you want to shake off a self like an old dead skin. You want to take how things are and chuck it like a rock. You pierce your face or tattoo your skin — anything to feel something beyond the numb of home. You invent clothes other people think are garbage. You get high. You meddle with sexuality. You stuff your ears with earbuds blasting music so loud it’s beyond hearing, it’s just the throb and heat and slam and pound and scream of bodies on the edge of adult. You text your head off. You guerrilla film. We live through sound and light — through our technologies. With our parents’ zombie life dope arsenal at our fingertips.”
Yuknavitch’s essays and stories have appeared on theRumpus.net and in The Sun magazine; she’s winner of honors including an Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the Penn Center Prize in nonfiction.
