Pirating Fairytales
w/ Melissa Leto

Four Thursdays beginning April 10th over Zoom from 4-6PM PST (4/10, 4/17, 4/24, 5/1)

Pull an object, character, or sound from every fairytale you’ve ever obsessed over: what does your list look like?

I want the enchanted forest, but less talking people and more talking ladybugs. I love magical spaces, but the storyline of a prince and princess was never of much interest to me. I’d rather swim in the magical lagoon and get out of the scene before a twig snaps. I love pulling these elements from stories and putting them in play with each other in other story realms: objects, moments, scenes, spells, maybe a cauldron or maybe a red hood. 

When I wrote Dervish;Wolf, I was carrying many things with me into story. One was the wolf from Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood and one was the bite of an apple from Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust. It wasn’t until Thrust that I heard the echo of the bite. Like bells ringing. It was power finally coming through the bite instead of punishment. Instead of sleep. Instead of betrayal and trickery. I was feeling story in the throat before that bite and now I feel it in my jaw, in my teeth. What I wanted was to carry that feeling into my own stories. 

Whether it’s a bite or the ability to go invisible, the desire to sleep for eons, shapeshifting into a form so much more powerful than you and capable of doing something your human skin is too small for—we are going to fill our pockets with as many of these curiosities and obsessions as we can to carry them into our own story realms.

All genres and hybridities welcome!

Pricing: The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks.

This workshop offers a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world; are you expecting an inheritance); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

$250 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$175 Companion

$100 Friend

Scholarships are also available for anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

Melissa Leto (she/they) makes art near the Salt River on Hohokam land in Arizona. Their work has appeared in KHÔRA, Shrew Lit Magazine, Tom Maxedon’s Word! podcast, Bloody Funny Zine, and Write On, Downtown. Their wordmaking weaves joy, grief, and trauma while infusing the interconnectedness of alive things on planet earth with queer desire into realms of hybridity. They're into the process of making art more than its commodified outcomes. They have an MFA from Northern Arizona University, are the lead facilitator for literary arts non-profit Revisionary Arts, and an editor for Rinky Dink Press. As a facilitator, their preferred spaces are generative, collaborative, weird, and conjure a sense of playing in story realms.