A is for Arches

         (If you’re waiting for April to officially begin the April A to Z Blog Challenge, don’t mind me!  I’m just getting a head start.  

You can read my Theme Reveal Post here, and when April comes I’ll direct you to the correct letter every day.)  My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Bittersweetness & Light, my new collection of hope-filled, joy-inducing fantasy and sci fi short stories, poems, and art.  I’ll be sharing lots of excerpts of art, stories, and poetry, and I’ll also be sharing some of the background on why we urgently need joyful stories.  If you like strange creatures, magical worlds, and being reminded of the good to be found in this world, come along with me.

        These arches are a mixed media illustration: a collage of papers which had been printed using a collagraph and a gelli plate.  To give a little printmaking background, a collagraph is a printing plate built as a collage (which you can read about in this prior post).  If you press a collagraph plate onto a gelli plate, it removes ink on the raised areas, thus making a sort of reverse, which can then be printed onto paper.  In this case, the paper was pages from an old dictionary.  (You can read about a previous gelli plate experiment of mine here.)

        This illustration appears in my book with a poem called “Love Song in a House of Words.”

    Thin, twining words that thrust their roots between emotion’s masonry,

    Dull, brazen words that glitter like a gong,

    Pebbles of sound that sink at once but leave their spreading rings,

    Deep, dusky words whose rings are blown of smoke,

 

    Take these to build your house, and furnish it with words…

        If it weren’t for the tyranny of the alphabet in the A to Z Challenge, I wouldn’t have started here, since this is neither a typical relief block print like most of my others, nor a particularly representative poem.  In terms of places to begin my introduction of this book, I might have chosen

    Art, in which I could write about how the pictures in this book are not mere illustrations of the text, but an important component of the book in their own right.  I envisioned this as a collection of short stories, poetry, and art, in which all three work together to bring delight…

    Adventure, in which I could write about the adventure of running a Kickstarter campaign and putting together this labor of love, as well as the magical adventures in some of the stories…

    Anxiety, in which I could write about how many of us are feeling an extremely high level of anxiety about the world these days, and how I hope that this book offers in some small way a bit of an Antidote, by reminding us that joy, beauty, and love do still exist all around, if we keep our hearts open to recognizing them, and stand up to support them.

        To find out more about the short stories, poetry, and art - and also about the joy, beauty, and love - I hope you’ll stick with me through the month of April.

        Marketing Moral:   Buy my book!  Okay, that’s not exactly subtle, but it is part of my moral of the entire month.  Throughout the A to Z Challenge I’ll be including a variety of ways to support small-time/indie authors and artists so that we can keep making art and keep bringing light into a world that certainly needs it.  It may see like no big thing, but in

the words of artist Joey Hartmann-Dow, “Art changes people, and people change the world.”

        Proper Moral: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s even cooler when you get words and pictures together!  I love them both!

        Words or pictures?  Do you have a preferred method of communicating, learning, or processing?

[Picture: Arches, collage by AEGNydam from Bittersweetness & Light, 2025 (See NydamPrints.com).]