Roxane Gay (RG): Most of the significant characters in The Small Backs of Children are named by the art they create. Why did you make that choice? How does creation function in the various threads you pull together?

Lidia Yuknavitch (LY): I have to make a confession in order to answer that question (recovering Catholic). More and more I am losing interest in traditional characterization as we've inherited it. Although there are foremothers and forefathers to whom I feel allegiance. Virginia Woolf, for example, in Between The Waves, in which six characters speak soliloquies. In this novel I was interested in how our subjectivities are made and unmade by the art that we make in particular, but really by what it is that we 'do' in life—in my case, making art, mothering, moving through the world leading with the body. I wanted to explore acts of making (creation) and unmaking (destruction) at the level of the bodies of women and children in particular. Men too, but men are not the focus of this particular story.

RG: As with much of your writing, there is an intimate focus on the body, fluids, the stuff we are made of, the stuff we make. Why does the body interest you?

LY: Because I have come to understand the body as an epistemological site, a corporeal place where meaning is endlessly generated, destroyed, regenerated. Like language, the body is a site of meaning-making. Sometimes I pretend that I'm the mutant love-child of Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison. In both of their work, the body refuses to be silenced, colonized, even as it is under duress, or tortured, or moving toward death. I think the bodies of women and children in particular (but also the bodies of men and those bodies in excess of or in between the terms male/female) are phenomenologically astounding. All experience is mediated through language and the body. All revolutions in meaning come from language and the body. Nowhere more than from the oppressed or colonized or abused body.

RG: How should we, as writers, as humans, write violence? Why is it important to write violence?

LY: We live in a time where our mass entertainment systems have so glamorized violence, so romanticized violence, that we are in danger of not recognizing it at all as anything but entertainment. And yet it is the corporeal fact of the body that endlessly resists; the body is the resistance narrative par excellence. Like others before me, my intent is to dislocate violence from exploitative and reductive representations and render violence and actual bodies as precisely as possible. Without flinching. To wrench the story away from a culture that feeds it to us daily as a show and remind us how some bodies are brutally enduring in the face of our self-soothing by and through violence as entertainment. To remind us that we are complicit in the very forms we addict ourselves to so that we can avert our eyes to the unbearable materiality of actual suffering bodies. It is important to me to write violence and sexuality away from consumer culture, in other words, like many before me, an enterprise I suspect we share. I also think, like sexuality, violence lives in us all in a variety of forms, and so I try not to thrust it away from me as if it's always someone else's action. We don't just need to address violence outside of ourselves. We need to address how it lives inside of us as well.

RG: Who are some of your creative influences?

LY: My creative influences are abstract expressionist painters, actually. And filmmakers and improvisational musicians. I'm obsessed with literature of course, but that's where I swim, like in the ocean of my own medium. So the writers whose oceans I swim within are important to me, writers like Duras and Stein and Lispector and Faulkner and Whitman and Dickinson and Acker and A. Carson and Morrison and Silko and Harjo and Maso and Lessing, and the right now writers like Maggie Nelson and you and Rebecca Solnit and Sarah Gerard and Amelia Gray and Claudia Rankine, but the truth is, I mostly turn to the visual and to music for inspiration. And to poets. Lots and lots and lots of poets. Like painters, they work from the distillation of image. That's my jam.

RG: In addition to being a writer, you're also a teacher. What is most important to you in terms of how you teach writing?

LY: What's most important to me is to resist 'teaching writing' at all costs. Because EWW. Deadly. What's important to me instead is to help illuminate for anyone who shows up (I get a lot of students who can't afford to be in college but who I let in the door anyway and I tend to teach in those 'institutions' we prefer not to acknowledge as such (like prisons and rehab and crisis centers and psych wards) that they have a relationship with language that can take them anywhere in the universe. That any body can inhabit language differently than we've been tricked into accepting. That every body has radical song in it. That a body can travel language in spite of what we've been told in life.

RG: What are the last great books you've read?

LY: The last great books I read: Gutshot (hurray! innovation!), The Argonauts (even though I argued with it out loud), and God Help the Child (Jesus. gutted.)

RG: How have you grown as a writer from your first book to this one?

LY: Um, lifetimes.

RG: What do you like most about your writing?

LY: What a question to ask an introvert! Wait, let me go hide in my bathtub with the shower curtain closed so that no one will see or hear me. I like the blank spaces between words, the silence before speech, the hidden meanings shaken loose when I wrestle a sentence away from 'sense' and toward lyricism. I like the way a single image can multiply and transform and become a thousand things. I like the process more than anything, to be inside making art is my favorite state of existence. I'd stay there forever, even if it meant entering psychosis, a real place that I have been to, if there were not good reasons and good people to draw me out in to the world. But there are good reasons. Good people. In spite of the mess we've made of the world. Writing is one of the only things I know how to do that has any chance of effecting change. Even if that change is tiny, it's not nothing.