London Writers' Salon #187: Lidia Yuknavitch — Writing from the Body, Finding Your Core Metaphors, plus The Memoir That Became a Kristen Stewart Film
Mar 28, 2026
Lidia Yuknavitch, novelist and founder of Corporeal Writing, explores writing from the body and the natural world. She discusses finding your elemental access path like water or forest. Short, practical rituals such as body-based meditations and a three-ages memory revisit become portals for shaping form. She also talks about nonlinearity, sensory-rich story shapes, and building generative writing communities.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Locate Core Metaphors Through Body Memory
- Use body-based meditation: slow breathing, locate a place in your body, and write memories tied to that place to surface recurring metaphors.
- Lidia's exercise: first, recent, difficult and joyous memory of that body place to reveal images like rocks.
Your Work Is One Stream To The Ocean
- Creative work isn't about individual fame; it's one stream among many flowing into storytelling's larger ocean.
- Lidia reframes personal output as contribution to a collective ecosystem of narrative and survival.
Use Mistakes As Creative Portals
- Treat mistakes and 'doing it wrong' as the creative learning zone where dendrites fire and transformation happens.
- Lidia urges embracing the anxiety of not knowing as the place that produces newness and growth.
