Georgia Pearle is Gulf Coast's Digital Editor.

Upcoming Guest Blogger: Lidia Yuknavitch

Georgia Pearle

Jun 28, 2015

The Gulf Coast Blog is gearing up for another month-long resident blogger: Help us welcome Lidia Yuknavitch to the GC Blog starting Monday, July 6th.
 
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel The Small Backs of Children (Harper, July 2015 ), the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books), The novel Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books), and three books of short experimental fictions:  Real to Real (FC2), Liberty's Excess (FC2), and Her Other Mouths.  She is also the author of a book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence (Routledge), and her work appears vigorously and variously online and off. She teaches writing, film, women's studies, and literature at Mt. Hood Community College, in the Low Residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University, and at institutions such as prisons, rehab centers, crisis centers, and other places we put people we would prefer not to think about.  She lives with the filmmaker Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles.  She is a very good swimmer.
 
Check out the trailer for The Small Backs of Children, made by Andy Mingo:

The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

About The Small Backs of Children (from Harper Collins)

A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art.

With the flash of a camera, one girl’s life is shattered, and a host of others altered forever. . .

In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own.

As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds—east and west, real and virtual—collide?

A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

Stay tuned to GC Blog for Lidia's first post, and make sure check out wok by past guest bloggers David Mura and Robin Black. Follow us on Twitter @gulf_coast, Facebook, and the hashtag #GCblog to stay updated.