Just One Thing with Kayla Lightner

Kayla Lightner’s story “If You’re Feeling Froggy” brings us along on a road trip that is bursting with tension, with images of small towns and pepper fields, with the narrator’s full bladder. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“While the tangled relationship between fear and safety––specifically for Black girls, who are often subjected to violence (mundane and extreme) in the name of keeping them "safe"––is something that I'm constantly revisiting in my work. However, the creative catalyst for this story actually occurred while reading Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies. There's an extremely tense moment when a young Mathilde is trapped in tight confines with a predatory older man, and she wards him off by purposely urinating on herself. I thought that moment was absolutely brilliant––the way that it blended power and precarity felt like it was speaking so viscerally to these questions about safety that I was already wrestling with. I knew immediately that I was going to try to work it into a story. I was a super anxious child, and I still believe that there are few things more fear-inducing than realizing that you are about to soil yourself in public, let alone in front of your mom. Add the Southern-gothic motif of a long road-trip through hostile terrain, and we were off to the races!”

Photo credit: Mary Ella Jourdak