Instructor’s novel being developed for the big screen

Mt. Hood humanities instructor could soon see her novel transformed into a motion picture.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2012 debut novel, “Dora: A Headcase,” has been optioned by Katherine Brooks, a veteran writer-director who operates her own Big Easy Pictures production company.

The book was optioned earlier this year. Brooks has one year to begin producing the movie or she must discontinue work or repurchase the rights.

“I don’t completely believe it’s going to happen… But more and more it seems like it’s kind of real,” said Yuknavitch, warming to the notion.

She describes the novel as: “A coming of age story about a girl who refuses to be told who she should be, and instead invents a self on her own terms. And that turns out to mean she wants to be an artist and she wants to communicate through art.”

Besides “Dora,” Yulnavitch has authored “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir,” which was awarded the 2012 Reader’s Choice Oregon Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

The MHCC literature and composition instructor also has authored three works of short fiction, “Her Other Mouths,” “Liberty’s Excess,” and “Real to Reel,” and “Allegories of Violence,” a book of literary criticism.

She said she’s not greatly concerned whether the new movie follows her newestbook exactly.

“I’m not very territorial about my work. It just seems to me like another kind of artist adapting something I did and making her own thing,”Yuknavitch said. “So, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s perfectly like the book. It’s just exciting to me, because somebody’s translating what I did into art.”

She said she’s pleased the novel’s message could get broader exposure through a full-length movie.

“I would just like to see a young woman who’s breaking rules, cultural rules, and (is) strong and creative and not afraid to do those things in public,” she said. “We get strong male characters all the time — we think they’re cool in movies and books — and there aren’t as many women like that.”

Brooks has finished the first draft of the screenplay and after some revisions, will pass it on to Yuknavitch for her input. Yuknavitch described this as unusual, and does not expect to have any further chance for feedback.

“If I could ever go on set and watch some of it… I would love that,” she said. “I would stay quiet and everything, but I would love to see it in process.”

She said Brooks told her that she understood the main character, Dora, who is inspired by the case study written by Sigmund Freud, known as the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud had studied and treated an 18-year-old woman with hysteria, whom he identified as “Dora.”

The director “talked a lot about what it’s like to be a smart young woman that people think of as a trouble maker, but really no one’s offered them good forms of expression yet,” Yuknavitch said.

“She had to research and read some Freud… because I wanted her to see what had agitated me when I first read Freud, especially in the famous case study about Dora.”

Brooks is now working on casting actors for the film, Yuknavitch said. The list of potential leads is intriguing; “They’re all people you’ve heard of and they’re on a spectrum of young women you’ve seen in movies who you would be surprised (to see play Dora) because they’re usually good girls in movies, all the way up to a young woman singer who you’ve heard of who gets in trouble a lot who may be interested,” she said.

Whom exactly, does Yuknavitch herself picture as Dora? She received an e-mail from a woman in France soon after her book was released there, who also was named Dora and did the same things as Yuknavitch’s character. There was a photo of the woman at 17, with bright pink punk hair, a lot of piercings and a leather jacket.

Yuknavitch said it perfectly matched her vision of the character. “I was just like, ‘That’s her, that’s her!’ ”

As an independent film, the movie doesn’t stand to produce a big box office return if it actually is produced, Yuknavitch said, but that’s not her objective. “It’s not so much about money as about getting more art and voices into the world.

“I believe in art, passionately,” she said. “I believe in women and men making more and more art because I think art is a language that has a chance of interrupting all of the other cultural garbage messages we get.

“My hopes are always that more people will make art, more women will make art, more people of color will make art, more gay people will make art, that there will be as many voices as possible.”