Assistant Lakeland Professor Madeleine Wattenberg will be teaching the poetry class: Rewriting Myth and Fairytale in Poetry.

Kate Bernheimer writes that “Fairy tales offer a path to rapture—the rapture of form—where the reader or writer finds a blissful and terrible home.”

In this generative poetry workshop we’ll write poems using myths and fairy tales as inspiration to tell new stories. We’ll think about how scavenging old tales can help us explore our own lives or even critique the oppressive narratives long told about our identities. For example, Emily Rose Cole’s poem “Wolf as Pick-Up Artist” reimagines the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood as a misogynistic pick-up artist and Rita Dove’s use of Greek mythology in her poetry collection Mother Love permits her to tell a difficult story about a mother who has lost her daughter. Together, we’ll take this path to see what new stories we can forge from the old in our poems. All levels of poetry experience welcome!

$15

12 participants

Madeleine Wattenberg is the author of I/O (University of Arkansas Press, 2021). Her work is also published in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Salamander Magazine, The Rumpus, Puerto del Sol, sixth finch, cream city review, DIAGRAM, and Best New Poets. She has a PhD in poetry from the University of Cincinnati and is an Assistant Professor at Lakeland University.