Fairy Tales as Foil and Fuse

Fairy tales–with their resonant archetypes, flat characters, and weird logic–create ideal launching points for a poem. In this generative workshop, we'll explore how established poets have used fairy tales to speak through characters in persona, establish tone and mood with pre-made settings, and push their own logic into more powerful places by either following a tale or writing against it. Using archival tales as both foil and fuse for our own writing, we'll gain practical tools for harnessing the mysterious world of fairy tales in poetry.