3 Questions with Lizz Dawson

Lizz Dawson is a writer from York, PA living in New York City where she's pursuing an MFA at The New School. She is an editorial intern at Creative Nonfiction and an editorial associate at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her work has appeared in Elephant Journal, Story Online, Peatsmoke Journal, and Bending Genres. You can find her online: @lizzdawsontwozs on Twitter, @lizzdawsonn on Instagram, or subscribe to her Substack, Hangry Ghost.

Steffi Sin chats with Lizz about her piece “Slime Flux” from Issue 70, out now. Lizz will also be reading at our virtual launch party and reading on September 7th.

In "Slime Flux,” you intertwine emotions of impending grief with images of sunflowers. My favorite line is the one about how sunflowers turn towards each other when they can't find the sun. How did you decide to use sunflowers as imagery and metaphor? 

It’s such a simple answer. Sunflowers are my mother’s favorite flower. Sunflower décor adorned our home growing up; it just made sense to weave them into the narrative. The setting of the piece, a hospital, is hardly a place that a reader wants to sit in for many pages, so I hoped the sunflowers would bring a sense of hope. Plus, my parents filled our living spaces with house plants for as long as I can remember, so perhaps subconsciously or instinctively this spirit crept into the piece.

"Slime Flux" is rooted in complicated and difficult emotions surrounding family, loss, and alcohol abuse. Was slime flux, the sunflowers—the narrator's turn towards nature—a way in which to frame this narrative, or did the narrative come first, and themes of nature were woven in later? 

I came across this phenomenon called “slime flux’” online, a poison that attacks trees, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the way the infection mirrored the familial, oozing nature of alcoholism. The narrative framed itself around the slime flux idea in an ambitious attempt to explore the intergenerational effect of alcohol abuse on a family. A piece often takes shape for me in this way: fragments and images that don’t feel like they’ll ever add up into a whole eventually. Slime Flux was like that—something grew from a mess on the page like magic.  

Is there anything you'd like to share about "Slime Flux" that we don't know?

It isn’t quite about the writing of the essay, but I’d love to share that my mother is over five years sober since the event of the narrative. Our family is so different since I began the very first draft of this piece years ago. I’d like to think that she and I did take that leap from the window together in our own way, and our relationship has transformed because of it. This essay being published really commemorates a miracle in my family’s life.