When the veil is thinnest, we turn to stories that have come before. Like a tune rather than a text, the fairy tale is a tradition performed again and again with each teller making the tale uniquely their own.
What makes a certain story so compelling, and how can we adopt it to the difficulty of our times? Where do familiarity and surprise intersect, and how can we draw from such a tradition to write our own compelling poems?
At the heart of this four-week advanced poetry course will be the question of the human impulse to gather for the same tales, over and over. We will explore both fairy tale form and subject matter, reading a handful of essays and interviews, but focusing on poems that draw from either familiar narrative or form, including the works of Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, and Vievee Francis.
Each week will offer a discussion and poetry prompt to inspire our own unique retellings of familiar tales, as well as instructor feedback on works generated during our time together. Every two weeks, we will meet live on Zoom.
Teaching Artist
2024 Holdich Award Winner
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter (Sundress 2021) and Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak (dancing girl press 2016) and co-Editor along with Catherine Moore of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Women Poets (Between the Lines Press). Stacey received her PhD from the University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. Her dissertation was awarded the 2024 Holdich Award. Her creative and critical work has appeared or will appear in Terrain, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, New South, Crab Orchard Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Gargoyle, Muzzle, Menacing Hedge, and other journals and anthologies. She previously contributed to the The Bind and now blogs occasionally at 1508 [A Blog Where Poetry Lives].
Her accolades include a 2024 MLA travel grant, the SAMLA 96 Graduate Award, a 2021 PEN America grant, the 2019 Terrain.org 10th Annual Contest, the 2019 New South Writing Contest, 2017 WNBA Poetry Award, the 2017 William Faulkner Words & Music Poetry Gold Medal, the 2017 Photo Finish Award, and the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. A 2018 Wurlitzer Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. She has earned several fellowships and scholarships to conferences including Sundress Academy for the Arts, Longleaf Writers Conference, Hambidge, Cape May Winter Getaway, Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference in Alaska, and Poetry by the Sea. Stacey lives in New Orleans.