Portals not prompts: a drafting practice

Novelist, memoirist, and Corporeal Writing founder Lidia Yuknavitch on writing from the body, finding form in the natural world, and why the stories we need most come from the places we’ve been afraid to go.

You’ll learn

• Why the element that makes you vibrate — water, forest, rock, wind — might be the key to unlocking your creative access path.
• How to find your core metaphors through a body-based meditation practice and why they keep showing up in your work for a reason.
• A practical portal for memoir writers: revisit one memory from three different ages and watch the story completely change each time.
• Why abandoning linear plot doesn’t mean abandoning form, and how the natural world is full of story shapes waiting to be borrowed.
• What Virginia Woolf’s line about arranging the pieces taught one writer about nonlinear structure and letting go of chronology.
• Why telling your ego to go eat a sandwich might be the first step toward trusting your creative intuition.
• How a writing community built on generative response instead of critique can change what’s possible on the page.
• The difference between prompts and portals, and why a small language shift can transform how you approach a draft.
• Why writers who’ve survived the hardest things carry a skillset the rest of the world urgently needs right now.
• A reframe for anyone afraid of writing badly: if all life is change, the fear of doing it wrong is smaller than you think.

Resources & Links

• 📄Interview Transcript
• Corporeal Writing
• The Chronology of Water
• Thrust
• Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
• She Had Some Horses by Jo Harjo
• Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
• Writers’ Hour

About

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader’s Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.

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