Master Class: Fairytales as Inspiration with Edward Carey
Master Class: Fairytales as Inspiration with Edward Carey
1 Session: Sunday, March 8
11:00am-2:00pm ET
Edward Carey
How to reignite your imagination, sharpen your fiction, and give yourself permission to be braver and stranger in your writing through the inspiration of fairy tales…
Edward Carey is here to show you how. He is the author of nine books including Little, The Iremonger Trilogy, and Edith Holler. His work has been published in 25 languages. For the last sixteen he taught at Michener Center and the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin, before returning to England. He was also a frequent visitor to Iowa Writers Workshop, where the first version of this class originated. Carey illustrates all his books and his illustrations have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera and in Wes Anderson's latest film “The Phoenician Scheme.”
In this seminar, we will visit these wondertales and see in all their darkness and boldness, how they still speak to us today and how they can liberate our writing. We’ll start with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, as well as the 1001 Nights and the work of Hans Christian Andersen, before moving to more modern practitioners, including Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter and Helen Oyeyemi.
We shall examine the simplicity of the form—it has been said that there is no fat on a fairy tale—its vibrancy, its sheer imagination, its cruelty and what lies beneath its seeming nonsense, often messages of a more sober and alarming content. We shall learn the lessons of economy and plot and character that such tales have to teach writers of any sort of fiction.
We shall visit ugly sisters, evil stepmothers, simple brothers, hapless tailors, little red caps, decaying houses, depressed Christmas Trees, bluebeards, flying trunks, many thieves, mutilated bodies, fake children, talking dolls, and a flea who lives with a louse. We shall consider terror and darkness, how best to survive and even triumph over monsters, monstrous parents, poverty, the whole terrible world.
There will be numerous exercises for writers throughout.
Workshop Highlights:
Letting your imagination run wild.
Rediscovering your love of story.
Giving yourself permission to be bolder and stranger with your work.
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, March 6.
Edward Carey is the author of nine books including Little, The Iremonger Trilogy, and Edith Holler. His works have been selected as book of year by the New York Times, NPR, Sunday Times, Times, Kirkus and have been published in twenty five different languages. He illustrates all his books and his illustrations have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera and in Wes Anderson's latest film “The Phoenician Scheme.” For fifteen years, he was a professor of creative writing at the Michener Center and the English Department at University of Texas at Austin and before that was a frequent faculty member of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he first started teaching fairy tales, a class which he has changed and developed ever since. He is currently on the faculty of Bennington College's low residency MFA program.
