Dandelion Honey © Vanessa Winship
We’re building a virtual Cabinet of Remedies and we’re offering you the opportunity to share your writing with our community. Through your work, you can help shape this important archive for the future.
Since we’ve been in lockdown, we’ve found much solace in Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s book, Art as Therapy. They talk about how art can connect us to our inner worlds and unique needs, identifying a number of psychological frailties to which art can be an antidote. Within this framework, we are asking artists to respond to the current situation. We are using this artwork as the foundation of a dialogue between visual art and the written word.
How to Participate
Create a piece of flash fiction using Dandelion Honey © Vanessa Winship as the prompt.
- Maximum 250 words, excluding the title
- One challenge: Please do not use the word ‘yellow’
- You are welcome to share up to five pieces
- Submit as an attachment to an email to hello@hundredheroines.org
- Deadline – 18:00 (BST) Monday 11th May 2020
- A selection will be published on our website over the next few weeks
Vanessa’s Inspiration for Dandelion Honey
“I met Julia Parks [link to on a residency in Cumbria. She’s a thoughtful person and always thinking of other people, and also knows about our granddaughter, and the things she might like to “do”
I’d told her of about her love of making things and of being outdoors, and she sent me this recipe for dandelion honey.
It is something that can be done really close to home and only really has three ingredients. The leaves and roots are also good to eat…but the honey part is probably the most appealing for a small person. So this task involves both being outdoors and coming back inside again to do the making. It’s also something you can do in several stages…the picking, the steeping, the boiling … the eating!
Yellow is the colour of the sun and was our granddaughters first declared favourite colour.
So even knowing I cannot be with her, I still went out to pick the dandelions and did all the making as we would have done it together.
Their scruffy heads are so perfectly chaotic, and yet not at all.
She may of course do it with her mother and or father….on their walks out during these times.
And to think also of dandelion seed head clocks, which as kids we used to measure time by blowing one, two three etc etc….it’s a wonderfully absurd measure …but time as a child is like that.
And in a certain way, time in heightened circumstances feels a lot like that …it expands and contracts.”
Small Print
- By entering your work, you agree that it can be published on our website and used to promote the Cabinet of Remedies initiative.
- You will be credited as the author of the work on our website.
- You retain the copyright over your work at all times.
