Tag Archives: Fairy Tales

Workshop Update: The Season of the Bear

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There are only TWO seats open for the Season of the Bear! Both openings are for the Tuesday night section. (Note: This translates to Wednesday morning/early afternoon in Australia). The course will begin in three weeks with the first meeting scheduled for March 7. The Season of the Bear meets for twelve consecutive weeks with the final class (portfolio presentation) scheduled for May 23.

This course won’t be offered again, so make sure to secure your seat before the workshop fills up!

Currently, the proposed schedule is as follows:

SECTION II: Tuesdays from 4:30-7 pm (PST), 5:30-8 pm (MST), 6:30-9 pm (CST), 7:30-10 pm (EST); Wednesdays 10:30 am-1 pm (AEDT)

Daylight Savings Time starts on March 12 on November 6 in the United States in Canada and on March 26 in Central Europe. Daylight Savings Time ends in Australia on April 2. For conversion check https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/. If there is enough interest, we may add an additional workshop on Friday afternoon or on the weekend.

Note: All sections are limited to six participants plus the workshop facilitator. Inquire for additional times & days.

THE SEASON OF THE BEAR workshop is twelve weeks long and includes five modules. Participants are encouraged to write a poem, short story, or essay (3K maximum word count) for each module. Alternating weeks are dedicated to study, discussion, and writing prompts. At the end of the course, writers will present one revision (5K maximum word count). The price to join THE SEASON OF THE BEAR is $600 with a 10% discount for returning participants.

Materials for THE SEASON OF THE BEAR include:

  • MODULE 1: Bear Tales & Hibernation
  • MODULE 2: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf & Extremophiles
  • MODULE 3: Baba Yaga & Fairy Tale Architecture
  • MODULE 4: The Boy Who Did Not Know What Fear Was & The Science of Fear
  • MODULE 5: Hades and Persephone & Sinkholes

REGISTRATION: To save a seat for The Season of the Bear, send an email request for an invoice to Carina Bissett at cmariebissett@gmail.com. The fee to attend the workshop is $600, payable to cmariebissett@gmail.com via PayPal. There is a $100 non-refundable deposit required to hold your spot with payment in FULL prior to the first class. Returning students receive a 10% discount. Space is limited. Payment plans available.

This series of interactive and generative workshops offers and opportunity to explore fairy tales and other traditional tales, paired with strange and marvelous concepts. You’ll have an opportunity to workshop five new stories or poems, and a portfolio piece you’ve revised based on the workshop discussions. This is a supportive and generative workshop that combines reading, discussion, writing, and feedback.

SCHEDULE

Week 1 (3/7): Retellings: Into the Dark Woods & Discussion of Module 1 reading material

Week 2 (3/14): Module 1 Story Workshop

Week 3 (3/21): Discussion of Module 2 reading material & prompts

Week 4 (3/28): Module 2 Story Workshop

Week 5 (4/4): Discussion of Module 3 reading material & prompts

Week 6 (4/11): Module 3 Story Workshop

Week 7 (4/18): Discussion of Module 4 reading material & prompts

Week 8 (4/25): Module 4 Story Workshop

Week 9 (5/2): Discussion of Module 5 reading material & prompts

Week 10 (5/9): Module 5 Story Workshop

Week 11 (5/16): Revision & Submission Strategies

Week 12 (5/23): Portfolio Presentations

What you get:

  • An introductory lesson exploring the history of the fairy tale, and various approaches to creating new works that draw on this rich and strange tradition.
  • Five lessons that combine a tale and a scientific or cultural concept, each of which includes traditional and contemporary tales, writing prompts, and stimulus information about the paired concept.
  • Twelve face-to-face workshops, delivered via Zoom and facilitated by The Storied Imaginarium’s passionate writers and teachers.
  • Access to a private Facebook group where you can interact with your facilitator and fellow workshop participants.
  • Access to a shared drive to upload your stories for workshopping.
  • An opportunity to share and discuss five of your original stories, plus an extra week when you can resubmit one story you’ve revised on the basis of the workshop discussion.
  • Written and oral feedback on the five stories + portfolio that you submit from both your peers in the workshop, and your workshop facilitator, including advice on potential markets for your work.

Guest Post: Foxes & Fairy Tales by Allison Pang

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Back in 2011 (holy hell, has it been that long??) I was a fledging author with a book deal and a burning urge to explore the world of writing for comics/graphic novels. But I knew it was a tough field and I hadn’t ever really considered how I would go about it.

Enter Irma ‘Aimo’ Ahmed. Aimo was what you might call a BNF (Big Name Fan) in the world of BioWare fan art (particularly Dragon Age/Mass Effect) and I had been a huge fan of her work for a very long time. I reached out to her on a whim, knowing that I absolutely wanted to work with her in some fashion, but we had never met each other, or even connected online, which makes it a bit difficult.

In the meantime, my first book had just been published (A Brush of Darkness), so I sent her an inquiry about doing some custom sketch card art for my series and hired her to do just that. (Said cards are currently framed in my upstairs hallway and I smile every time I see them.)

From there, I asked if she might be interested in a collaboration of sorts, split the profit and see what we could do. By a stroke of luck, she agreed, and we started brainstorming. In the meantime, we wanted to make sure we could actually work together – after all, we still hadn’t actually met, and she lived half-way around the world from me. (And we did manage to meet up in 2015, and again in 2019 – but we keep up in almost daily contact via LINE.) We started a mini series of illustrated fan fiction where I wrote *her* characters and she conjured up some lovely vignettes to go with the prose, posted on Tumblr and a few private ones just for fun.

Based on that, we decided to write a short comic. A one-shot. Something small, to see if I could write a script that she could capture with her art.

10 years later…

*insert hysterical laughter here*

Yeah, so, it turned out the small story erupted into a huge story and here we are, somewhere in our 5th  arc and counting. (And really, this is no small feat. Collaborations can be touchy at the best of times – the fact that we’re still here and creating is something of a miracle, and one I’m grateful for.)

So what is Fox & Willow all about? Well, when we were playing around ideas and concepts, we thought fairy tales would be a fun thing to work with. After all, there are so many out there, and on the surface they often don’t give female characters as much agency as we might want. At the time, I was more interested in possibly exploring Asian folklore – but Aimo is from Malaysia and was all about the European tales that I grew up with.

In the end, we compromised with Asian characters placed into the backdrop of European fairy tale settings. Essentially, we follow the adventures of Willow, a runaway princess and Gideon, a fox-spirit/kitsune who has had a curse placed upon him in the form of a collar that cannot be removed. The longer it remains around his neck, the more he loses himself, eventually dooming him to become nothing more than a fox, even as Willow has to come to grips with her own past and what it is she really wants.

Although each volume of Fox & Willow is a separate, stand-alone fairy tale, the overall arc of redemption and finding out who they are and what they mean to each other is a constant theme throughout. The volumes include references to Twa’ Sisters, The Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood and currently the Snow Queen, exploring a number of potential concepts. (What if The Little Mermaid actually *does* kill the prince? What if the tower is an erupting volcano in Rapunzel? What if Red Riding Hood is in a poly relationship with the woodcutter and a shape-changing wolf?)

There is something intrinsic about fairy tales that touches people. The possibilities to change them up are endless –and old as they are, somehow references to them are still a deep part of the modern society hive mind. (Case in point – Aimo sent me a slew of limited edition Hello Kitty fairy tale plushies that were Malaysian specials from her local McDonald’s – the Snow White, I would have expected. The Singing Bone, I would not – but now I have a Singing Bone Hello Kitty plush, and It. Is. Amazing.)

Fox & Willow has been a long work in process and a labor of love – over ten years now, of two pages a week, all for free, with the occasional hiatus. The world has changed so much in the last decade, but we’re still here and we’re still writing this fairy tale. Now we’re getting a chance to bring these tales into physical hardcopy thanks to Outland Entertainment and KickStarter, and we look forward to continuing to do so.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allison is the author of the Urban Fantasy Abby Sinclair series, the steampunk IronHeart Chronicles series and also the writer for the webcomic Fox & Willow. She likes LEGOS, elves, LEGO elves…and bacon.

To learn more about Allison, go to https://www.heartofthedreaming.com/.

To support Allison and Aimo, preorder your copy of Fox & Willow: Blinded by the Light at KICKSTARTER. The book will be a 140 page, full color, hardcover at 6″x 8.5″. This KICKSTARTER ends on February 8TH.