Recount = tell someone about something; give an account of an event or experience.
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
– Gabriel García Márquez
Art by Ferdinand Keller.
Fuse = a long piece of string or paper which is lit to make a bomb or a firework explode.
“The Possible’s slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.” – Emily Dickinson
Art by Alphonse Mucha.
Falsehood = the state of being untrue.
It is astonishing what force, purity and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
–Margaret Fuller
Art by Anne Sophie Petersen.
Moonbeam = a ray of light from the moon.
“Memories are like moonbeams, we do with them what we will.” – Bobby Darrin
Art – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by John Ferguson Weir.
Chortle = laugh in a noisy, gleeful way.
“Books feed and cure and chortle and collide.”
–Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 2, 2000)
Art by Boris Diodorov (cover for The Little Mermaid).
Womb = uterus; a place where something is generated.
“You look at trees and called them “trees,” and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a “star,” and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, “tree,” “star,” were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of “trees” and “stars” saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was “myth-woven and elf patterned.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Art by Ian Miller.
Heartbeat = one complete pulsation of the heart.
“A poem is when you hear the heartbeat of a stone.”
–Jean-Pierre Simeón, This is a Poem That Heals Fish
Art by Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903).
Asbestos = a soft, greyish-white material that does not burn, used especially in the past as a protection against fire and as a form of insulation.
“Some writers can handle lava with bare hands, but I’m not so tough, my skin is not asbestos. And in fact I have no interest in confession. My games are transformation and invention.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin
Art by Dani Soon.
Symbiotic = involving interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association.
“Stories … are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.”
– Neil Gaiman
Art by Rob Rey.
Dandelion = a small wild plant with a bright yellow flower that becomes a soft white ball of seeds called a dandelion clock.
“Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons.”
–Vladimir Nabokov
Art by James R. Eads.