Sometimes when I write, I give pieces of my own life to my characters. Like Niamh, I love the story of the Children of Lir. And also like Niamh, I feel that the most common ending of the story—a convenient priest, the baptism of the four former swans—is wrong. And by wrong, I mean in the sense of not matching up with anything in the previous part of the story. It feels tacked on, as if a different person wrote the ending to a story someone else started. And so when given the chance to retell the Children of Lir, I wanted to write about that odd-seeming ending, and about the way stories get told, about what gets passed on. My version of this story is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother.
KAT HOWARD