Radical Re-Visioning as a Hero’s Journey

In folklore, women have been placed into stories which, often, are meant to define appropriate (and inappropriate) behavior. Folklore forms a collective and cultural heritage handed down from birth. Women are, traditionally, not the heroes, and are often erased as the creators. In this course, we’ll explore the ways in which these stories oppress, like the marriage plot which, as Julia Phillips writes in The Baby on the Fire Escape, “makes no provision for the creative self,” by examining the folklore cycle of several familiar stories, looking at the origins, and then feminist revisions spanning from Anne Sexton to Patricia Smith and beyond. I will also explain how fairy tale and myth work in my debut collection, Swan Wife, which is structured according to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and is made up of many myth and fairy tale fracturings. I will ask you to not simply revise a tale, but to do the heroic act of breaking the story apart and inserting the self, thereby breathing something new into a tired tale. Not only will we be taking back the narratives, but it is also my hope that we utterly break them apart so that they and we, as HD wrote, will be “born again or break utterly.”

More practically, in this generative course, students should come prepared with their favorite fairy tale or myth, one which they relate to closely (or one which repels!). We will journey through at least one familiar tale together and write at least two poems. In sharing and discussing something old, we will find new truths about ourselves and history.

About Sara Moore Wagner

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize-winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize (forthcoming in 2024), Swan Wife (2021 Cider Press Review Editors Prize, published in 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, published in 2022), and the author of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com