What’s Black and White and Green?

         First, to celebrate “Black and White” - It’s our Blogiversary!  Fifteen years ago I started blogging, and in 1,504 posts so far I’ve shared my thoughts, theories, and enthusiasm for relief block prints and speculative fiction, and of course Words of the Month.  My audience is small, and I’m really not much of a social media type, but I’ve appreciated the opportunity to connect with the folks who have found this blog over the years.  If you’re reading this, thanks for being here with me!

        In the past few years I’ve been posting a little less frequently, and I’ll admit that sometimes I really don’t have time for this.  But even though sometimes it feels like a chore, there are other times when I still really enjoy it.  So perhaps I’ll be scaling back my posts still further - but on the other hand, who knows?  I probably wouldn’t have guessed 15 years ago that I’d still be doing this now.

        In addition to Black and White’s fifteenth birthday, another item to celebrate today is the publication of another poem.  “The Green Girl Thinks of Home” just came out in the Summer 2025 issue of New Myths, and you can read it (plus the rest of the contents) here.  I hope you enjoy my poem - but it will help if you know about the legend of the Green Children…

        The character of the Green Girl comes from a folk tale from Suffolk in the East of England.  Some time in the 12th century two mysterious, green-skinned children were found near the town of Woolpit.  The brother and sister spoke an unknown language, were dressed in unfamiliar style,  and could eat no normal food except broad beans.  The boy soon died, but the girl eventually learned English and explained that she came from a land that was always in twilight.  While watching cattle in this green, twilit land, the children entered a cave, and following the sound of church bells, at length they emerged in England.

        Of course the motif of entering another world through a cave is a very common one in folklore, but it’s interesting that this time we are the strange other world.  Folklorists have come up with various explanations and interpretations: tales of aliens ranging from faeries to indigenous Britons to Flemish settlers to extra-terrestrials… or tales of ancient harvest rituals or metaphors of death and rebirth, or perhaps garbled tales of some historical event such as a kidnapping, arsenical poisoning, or  hypochromic anemia…  According to the story, the Green Girl learned to eat other foods, was given a job as a maid, and eventually married.  I don’t know whether she had children.  A number of other writers have explored the story in various ways, but for me the interesting part is the defamiliarization of what our world would seem like to someone who had known only twilight.

        The idea for the poem and a first draft date back a long time, probably some 35 years.  But relatively recently when I started getting back into writing and submitting poetry, I came back to it and reworked it considerably.  However, the basic idea has stayed the same: everyone always says that enduring the “troughs” of experience is worth it in order to enjoy the “peaks” — but what if it’s better not to have any extremes at all?  Certainly someone from a land of perpetual twilight might think so.  What do you think?

        My illustration is a rubber block print that didn’t really turn out as I’d hoped.  I used the bad rubber and I had such a tough time with the printing that I don’t know whether I’ll even bother making an entire edition of originals for sale.  But I wanted to illustrate the poem because TEASER ALERT: I expect to include it in my next collection of stories, poems, and art, which now has the working title Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming months!

[Picture: “Then the Magic Happened,”cover art by Paula Hammond for New Myths Vol. 19, Issue 71, Summer 2025 (Image from NewMyths.com);

Green Girl at Twilight, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025.]