Writing, Dreaming, Writing.

Grateful to Know Lidia, Rene. Grateful for Writers.

The other day, I woke up before five in the morning—too early. The house wasn’t yet hot, but it had a serious head start in that direction, even as the sun was just starting to come up. Both tired and awake, not yet ready for the day and seeing the sunrise, before I made coffee I put on an audiobook, Lidia Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves. My plan? I’d think about writing before starting the day.

It’s Lidia’s voice, reading her book. Lidia! Ha! I hadn’t anticipated that she read the audiobook herself. With the lilt and tone of her distinctive voice, it was as though I’d invited Lidia in before I was even up or ready for the day and she was telling me about her life.

Maybe you saw this coming—I fell back asleep, crashed out, sunk back into dreamland. The audiobook was still playing, Lidia talking about the pieces of her existence and how they come together, life. Her voice laced itself through some nonsensical dreams, as though she were walking through my mind.

There’s something so deeply human about stitching together experience and conveying a world of emotion and meaning, the two bonded in existence, trying to make sense out of life by constructing stories, to build a vehicle to convey emotion, handing it from one person to another, understanding and experience from one mind to the next, to say This is me…

Third-person, first-person, fiction, nonfiction…the writer is always on the page, in choices and delivery.

I went down to Powell’s last night, saw Rene Denfeld launch her new novel, The Talking Bone. Lidia was the “in conversation” part of the launch. Both Rene and Lidia are brilliant.

Grateful to wander, to listen, to witness.

I hope you’re finding a space in the world of words and images, love and friendship, to be yourself and reach for something like joy and understanding. Sing it, baby.

Here for it,

xo