Instructor
Gillian Parrish
Class Type
Lit & Craft [& Workshop in final fortnight]
Course Description
Fairytales are stories of chance and change, spurred by curses, blessings, paths, tasks, creatures and kisses. This course will open with a week of memoir essays by writers who share their personal histories with fairytales, giving us a chance to reflect on our own connections with the genre. We will go on to explore contemporary fairytale retellings by some of today's best loved sci-fi fantasy writers. We will also explore a middle-grade reader that includes subtle fairytale elements. While fairytales' primary gift to writers is the provision of basic plots that we can then tweak or deepen, or depart from, during "Witch Week," we will turn to that particularly potent fairytale figure as a spur for our work. In our final fortnight together, we will workshop one of your flash pieces and turn to work that you select for us to explore.
Textbook
Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales by Parisien, Dominik / Wolfe, Navah 9781481456135
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Bernheimer, Kate (Ed.) 9780385486811
Louisiana's Way Home by DiCamillo 9781536207996