--I HAVE COME TO BELIEVE THAT ALL LIFE IS PRECIOUS

 

…Happy Friday to your happy face...

 

...The other day I had this up at Revolution John:

https://revolutionjohn.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/christmas-day-fiction-by-len-kuntz/

…This story, “The Remedy”--a long piece--is one of the first I wrote when I started writing full-time six years ago, and it’s in the inaugural issue of The Literary Nest today:

http://theliterarynest.com/issues/vol-1-issue-4/fiction/Len-Kuntz/

…and these two short pieces, “Moccasins” and “Bone Yard” up at Kaaterskill Basin Journal on pages 79 and 81:

http://kaaterskillbasinjournal.com/issues/

...I don’t know if you know Lidia Yuknavitch, but she wrote “The Chronologies of Water,” a searing memoir that breaks the memoir mold and is like anything I’ve ever read.

Yesterday I saw some quotes from her that were quite funny, raw, honest and powerful.

She’s getting more and more famous and I’m happy about that.
Anyway, I thought this would be good introduction to the weekend, seeing as how most people are actually most creative then:

-“If I hadn’t made stories up my whole life I’d be dead I think.”

-“I like to think of myself as the love-child of Walt Whitman, Julia Kristeva and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Because of course it was a threesome!”

-“Thankfully, I’ve learned by now to channel all my bad behavior into making art, love, family. I get arrested and fired less often.”

-[How do you feel now that this book is available to readers worldwide?] “Like my vagina is on my head. The writing didn’t make me feel exposed. The process was one of the more important artistic productions of my life. But the letting go of the book … the putting it into the hands of others … that part is terrifying. What if someone tells me it smells of poo? Or that I suck?”

-“I still feel kind of happy in my niche. I never thought I’d be rich as a writer – I use too many words like fisting and douche and vag. I just wanted to make books that are of some “use” to someone. I want to make books that participate in the labor of what I think of as making art. I still feel those things. If there are more readers, it means I have the opportunity to jam my foot in an open door and help sneak as many of us as possible through.”

-There IS a difference between shouting your self story all over everyone and making art.”

-“You have to bring the body to bare on all of your experiences, you have to let the body have its story no matter what, you have to let bones sing and muscle go taught or slack, you have to know when to scrap and when to surrender and when to suck or fuck or loosen rage, you have to hear and see and taste and touch what’s around you eve nit it’s abject, or worse, like letting a spider go in your eyeball, or sticking your finger in a gunshot wound, or understanding that the cup of someone else’s body around your own is a universe.”  --Lidia Yuknavitch