Fairy Tale Lessons in Craft with Sarah Gerkensmeyer

Instructor: Sarah Gerkensmeyer

What can any writer of any genre learn about craft from studying the fairytale? Fairytale scholars such as Kate Bernheimer, Jack Zipes, Phillip Pullman, and Italo Calvino would assert that all writers have a lot to learn from the fairytale, whether we are interested in directly retelling old tales in our own work or we would like to tap into the unordinary elements that are flowing beneath our writing in a more general way. From the fairytale we can learn about magic flatly rendered, the ironic precision of abstraction, the taboo, subtext, grace, rhythm, among many other things. From the fairytale we can better understand the extraordinary that resides within the ordinary in our writing (and vice versa), and how this might help us tap into the intricacies and mysteries of our own voices.