Interview with Matthew Fults, Author of The Sunflower Widows

The inspiration for The Sunflower Widows came from a single photograph. I was reading a story in a magazine about the widows of Ukraine and how the war had created tens of thousands of young women left with an unknown future. This particular photograph was at a mass grave… the dirt was fresh, the flowers were fresh, there were other people in the background, but this one woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She was just crying her eyes out, wrapped in a Ukrainian flag. There was something so powerful about that photo… I couldn’t shake it for weeks.

I started to think about what their lives were like — whoever her husband was, what their life was like before the war, how they met, and whether they had children. And then what her life was going to be like now, with the war still going on and her husband gone. I just felt like there was a really important story to tell about what happens at home.

I later found out that there are several groups supporting widows in Ukraine, and that was also an inspiration for this story. As for the time and place, it’s a mythical village in a mythical part of Ukraine. But I think it speaks to all the villages in all parts of Ukraine, because everybody’s losing something.