Honeyed Words: English Vegetation Strikes Back Against Stereotypes

English Vegetation Strikes Back Against Stereotypes · 28 May 2007

My next review for the Once Upon a Time Challenge will be, The Hawk’s Gray Feather by Patricia Kennealy. I wasn't initially planning to feature this book, but I changed my mind. After spending last week experimenting with English food and reading about the England of the Arthurian legends, I had a lot of ideas for the review that I felt were worth inclusion on the front page.

I also spent last week playing around with the Tiny Story genre in order to ready my final entry for Carl’s Tiny Story Challenge.

The parameters of the Tiny Story challenge were a test of my flexibility as a writer. The goal of the challenge is to write a Tiny Story, 100 words or less. This sounded relatively easy, until Carl threw in the challenging part. You can’t use the same word twice. Since I just completed my linguistics course, I started diagramming possible sentence structures in my head. It's not hard to avoid using the same noun or adjective, in fact, any writer has performed numerous exercises to remove the repetition of certain words from their writing and to make their descriptions more dynamic.

The tricky part of writing 100 words without repeating any is the elimination of common conjunctions and determiners (the, a, he, and, etc.). We have a small number of short words that provide useful grammatical functions. Despite trying to write prose, my first attempts at Tiny Stories resembled poetry, which is in part defined by it’s unusual grammatical structure. We’re used to seeing standard tags that identify sentences. If you take those tags away, everything seems more lyrical. Hopefully my entry is “prosaic” (sorry, couldn’t resist) enough for Carl.

Since it took me a few tries to get what I was aiming for, I decided to post this attempt, which isn't the one that I'll be submitting. The original concept for this story was a feature on native English food and was supposed to go along with the feature on To Say Nothing of the Dog and be an homage food that doesn't have to be bland, but the more I wrote, the more it ended up being a hybrid of my research into the foodstuffs of England and my reading of The Hawk's Gray Feather and a tribute to food that is in no way tame.

It seemed that Arthurian England was channeling itself into my subconscious and demanding a stage on which to be seen. After bowing to the Muse, The Hawk's Gray Feather will now have it's own section, with this Tiny Story as it's Prologue.

Green Man Reborn

Two mist-clad priests strolled through the garden, fruit cradled in each hand, vegetables twined round their heads. I paused, entranced. One sliced pears as offerings, rubbed sweet juices on my skin; baptized me. Strands of peas they strung like pearls encircling both arms. Roots speared each booted foot, vines grew fibrous sinew and melded chlorophyll to blood. Carnelian flowers sprouted, trumpeting perfume out parted lips. Small acorns shined through eyes that saw no more.

Transformed, forever fused with earth. I’d wished but a purloined cabbage.

Images include links to the Meri Mask and Earthsong websites which sell the pictures Green Man art.

English Ingredients, English Food, Green Man, The Hawk's Gray Feather, Tiny Story