Why Moonflower & Myth?
By Tia Hinz, M.Ed. M.A
Names are hard.
Especially when you're naming something that started as a tiny idea and very quickly became something you care deeply about.
I knew I wanted the name to feel a little magical. A little literary. A little strange. I didn't want something that sounded overly polished or corporate. I wanted something that felt like the stories I love and the community I hope to build.
And apparently, the answer was Moonflower & Myth.
Why Moonflower?
I am obsessed with poisonous plants.
Which is probably a perfectly normal sentence to put on the website of a literacy organization.
Hear me out.
Something is fascinating about plants like belladonna. They're beautiful, but we have decided they're also dark, dangerous, and something to fear.
And yes—some of them absolutely can hurt you.
But that's not the whole story.
Many plants we consider poisonous have complicated histories. The same plant can contain compounds that have been studied or used medicinally, while the wrong dose can be incredibly dangerous.
It's the balance that fascinates me.
Helpful and harmful.
Beautiful and dangerous.
Something can be more than one thing at the same time.
For some reason, I find that oddly comforting.
Maybe because humans are like that, too.
We like putting things into categories: good or bad, beautiful or ugly, useful or useless, normal or strange.
But nature doesn't really care about our categories.
And neither do the best stories.
But... moonflowers aren't belladonna.
I know. 😂
During the process of naming this project, I kept coming back to poisonous gardens, misunderstood plants, moths, nighttime, darkness, and flowers that don't quite fit the traditional image of a bright, cheerful garden.
I loved names involving belladonna, but nothing quite clicked.
Then came moonflower.
Moonflowers bloom at night.
There's something about that image I couldn't let go of.
Not everything has to bloom in full sunlight.
Not everything beautiful has to be bright.
Not everything that thrives in darkness needs to be rescued from it.
Some things are meant to bloom there.
Moonflower felt like belonging without requiring sameness.
And that felt right.
And Then There's Myth
This part is considerably easier to explain:
I freaking love mythology.
Give me gods behaving terribly. Give me monsters that aren't actually the monsters. Give me stories that have been retold so many times that nobody can quite agree on where one version ends and another begins.
I love folklore. Legends. Fairy tales. The strange stories humans have created for thousands of years to explain things we didn't understand.
Because mythology is storytelling at its most human.
Before books, podcasts, movies, TikTok, or someone deciding to start an overly ambitious literary project on a random day, humans told stories.
We used them to understand the world.
To preserve history.
To frighten each other.
To teach.
To entertain.
To explain the inexplicable.
And sometimes just because telling a really good story is fun.
Myth belongs in a name about stories.
Also... Alliteration
And finally, we have to acknowledge the extremely sophisticated branding strategy behind the name:
My autistic butt loves alliteration.
Moonflower.
Myth.
M&M.
The second I said Moonflower & Myth out loud, my brain went:
Ohhhhh.
There it is.
Sometimes that's really all it takes.
More Than a Name
The more I've lived with the name, the more it has started to represent what I want this community to be.
Moonflower is curiosity, difference, darkness, beauty, contradiction, and blooming where you bloom.
Myth is storytelling, imagination, history, culture, and the strange human need to make meaning through stories.
Put them together, and you get something a little whimsical.
A little dark.
A little weird.
A place for stories that don't always fit neatly into the garden we've already planted.
And if you've read anything else I've written here, you probably know by now:
I think the world could use a lot more weird.
Welcome to Moonflower & Myth.
