Aura publishes artist spotlights to provide readers with the opportunity to get to know the authors and artists published in Vol. 48 Issue No. 1 of Aura Literary Arts Review. In our final artist spotlight article of the year, we introduce Taylor Lyon…
Taylor Lyon is a speculative fiction writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works in content strategy and design, and before that he was an English teacher for several years. Outside of writing and work, he loves to hike, read, watch movies, bake bread, and sculpt animals wearing small hats.
Taylor gravitates toward reading speculative fiction and magical realism, so his work tends to reflect those genres, though “Jar of light” is one of his more realist pieces. Typically, he takes a lot of inspiration from Latin American authors such as Borges, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and others. There’s something inexplicably magical in how those writers blur the line between reality and fantasy, forcing us—the readers—to decide for ourselves what’s real and what isn’t.
“Jar of Light” is a very personal story. It’s partly autobiographical—much of his life is in this story, yet at the same time much of it’s absent. You can look at the piece from a few different angles. From one perspective, it’s very much about what we lose during or after childhood, what we lose from the jar we hold. Another side of the story is the relationship between the child and the father and how parental behavior influences how children process and react to trauma.
Click the cover below to read Taylor’s “Jar of Light” in Aura:
