Amy Lyons’ Comments

These stories are part of a project I’ve been working on for a while. I started with the concept of a child facing the terminal illness and death of her mother, and just wrote a ton of stories and scenes from the child’s point of view. I’m interested in child narrators, specifically how they experience and give voice to trauma and grief. I like working with the child’s point of view in the context of heavy material, because kids can be really funny and light and insightful in the face of great difficulty. They can also be confused and disoriented and vulnerable. All of that felt important and rich. Giving a child voice and agency and intelligence and a point of view has felt like an act of love because I was a child when my mother died and it was the most disorienting experience of my life.

During my M.F.A., I worked with this child and her world, and ended up delivering a lecture on the child’s point of view in literary fiction. I read a ton of books with child narrators or child POV characters: We the Animals; The Book of Aron; Sing, Unburied, Sing; A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and others. Immersing myself in the tradition of child narrators in literature helped me to value my own attempts at this work.

I was thrilled when one of these stories featuring my child narrator found a home at Waxwing in recent months, and seeing these three in FRiGG is really rewarding. It’s a great feeling to work for a long time with characters and storylines and not really know how the work will come together, and to then see it begin to make its way out into the world. It reminds me that faith in the process is essential.

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