UFR Weekly Newsletter #24: You Are Not A Monster
David Cotrone
It’s hard to pick favorites, but there are things you’ll always keep close. This interview with Lidia Yuknavitch is one of those things. I read The Chronology of Water back in December, when I needed it. A few weeks ago I lent it to a friend. She needed it too. When Lidia agreed to talk with us we came up with some questions. Really, a lot of what we came up with weren’t questions at all. “Can’t we just tell her we love her?” she asked. I smiled. She said, “I’m not kidding.”
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(…) by James Tadd Adcox
Three stories by Vallie Lynn Watson
Michael Kimball, author of Us, talks with furniture, saying, “Years ago, I wouldn’t have said that fiction helps us better understand our lives, but now I would. Now I do.”
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Later that week we drove south to Rhode Island and listened to a lot of music, songs off albums with names like Life in Slow Motion and Astral Weeks. When we found the ocean we parked the car and went to the beach. We sat on the sand and the tide was out. “I want to feel the water,” she said. It was early morning, the moon still up. Behind us, something metal banged in the wind.
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Reading the Groove: Chris Offutt
The Place I Come From by Sara Habein
A new photo from Maya Chavez Akin
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I was writing to someone who was having a hard time. I said, sometimes the thing about any kind of suffering isn't that it makes you stronger. It makes you weaker. It makes you want to crawl inside someone else and stay there, or else inside yourself, or else into nothing. It makes you want to crack open. It makes you want to cry. The river of you might open, I said. But rivers are never for drowning.
I talked about Amy Hempel, a story from Reasons to Live, a book that's all, in some way, about dying. In the story, there’s a woman spending time with her friend who’s sick in a hospital bed. The friend asks the woman to make conversation, to tell her anything. “I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet,” the woman says. By the end, the friend is dead and all the woman can feel is regret, some of it unnamed and some of it because she was too scared to be there the night her friend passed. You get the sense that that there are kinds of pain that’s dirty with regret, that rain is what keeps rivers full. Something like that, why would you want to only fly and miss it?
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We headed back before the sun had time to rise. When we got back home — to a city in Massachusetts — we laughed and said it wouldn’t be long until we decided to travel again. Two nights later we drove north, and kept going.
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In the interview, I asked Lidia for advice, something simple. “The world of art has room for you,” she said. “It can hold you. It can reflect back to you something besides despair. Come in,” she continued. “And this, which Mary Shelley told me in a dream when I was 14: You are not a monster.”
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Thanks for reading, and thanks for helping us grow. Don't be afraid to say hi.
David