Week 7 - March 26
from
Goddesses to Witches: The Art of Hunger On the Dark Path
If you are hungry, eat desire.
Schimel
"Fairytales for Writers: Sleeping Beauty" just one tiny
prick of criticism is all it takes sometimes to put a burgeoning
writer to sleep for a hundred years
1. Prologue:
the First Story:
The
first story is not about light or apples.
The first story is about the woods,
the woman in the red hood, the Wolf.
Lana Hechtman Ayers (On the Dark Path 1)
2. Tatar:
Off with Their Heads
a. The handful
of stories from Perrault and Grimm that have become a part of
our common cultural heritage in the Anglo-American and European
Worlds consists of tales with an emphatic bias in favor of passive
heroes and heroines -- figures who start off a victims but live
happily ever after because they are beautiful or lucky. These
are also stories modeled on a transgression/punishment pattern
consonant with an ideology in which the Calvinist notion of
Original Sin has taken hold.(xxi)
b. It is
astonishing that we reflect so little on the stories read to
our children.(xxvii)
c. Laughter
becomes a subversive power, undermining the stable truths of
official culture and producing an irreverently playful world
of change and renewal.( (5)
d. To turn
a heroine into a tragic martyr often required little more than
putting a broom in her hands (7)
e. Fairytales,
we have been taught to believe, offer comfort to children….
In reality the picture is quite different. (11)
f. The pedagogy
of fear (35 MY PAGE 26)
g. Daughters
of Eve - playing with fire (94-95 MY PAGE 33)
h. "The
casual way in which fairy-tale parents sacrifice their daughters
to beasts is nothing short of alarming" (140)
i. Cannibalism
and oral greed (MY PAGE 43)
3. Small
group workshop:
How do poets
appropriate fairytales: what shape do they need the fairytale
to take, what form to its unfolding task: for the poem you are
assigned:
1. find
a passage that gives a clue as to what is at stake for the poet
in the poem and in this fairytale she/he has chosen to explore
in her/his poem
2. draw a picture that captures what is at stake
Then look at your own poems: explore what you are pulled to,
what needs work
but also decide what is at stake for the poet here
(ALL MY PAGE
Numberings)
Bergman: "Twig" (8)
Caruthers: "only the Palest
beauty" (8-9)
Cuello (Gretel" (10-11)
Fry "Pear" (13)
Howells: "Snow White: the Princes
Soliloquy"
McKetta: "The Frog King"
(23)
Olden: "Goldilocks" (26)
Pereze "Adv ice to My Younger
Self" (27)
Schaeffer: "House of Bricks"
(29)
Soden: "Hansel and Gretel"
(35)
"Codes
of Hunger" (MY PAGES 38-39)
"…And
she's right, you're hungry. Go ahead
Open.
Take the glowing world she's holding out"
Hunger /cannibalism
in
"Hansel and Gretel" (3-15), "Juniper Tree"
(42-55),
and
"Vasilisa The Fair" (56-69)
Write your own fairytale: do not give in to the temptation
of humor, its evasions
If Vasilisa
gets a skull with which she can provide fire what would you like
Baba Yaga to give you
BRING FAIRYTALE PACKET BACK WITH "DONKEYSKIN"
