In this generative flash workshop, we will explore how writers of color have rewritten the Western fairy tale to heal cultural wounds, how they’ve introduced English-language readers to the heroes and tropes of other countries’, cultures’, and languages’ folklore, how they’ve forged their own new myths, and how we can do the same.

Fairy tales, folklore, and myth are often our introductions to narrative as children: these are the first stories that will teach us what stories can do. This is itself powerful magic—our earliest memories shape so much of who we become as well as our relationships to our culture and the world we live in. What happens, then, when the stories we know do not reflect who we are, or when the stories of our cultures, our families, our ancestral lands are little-known in English-language literature? How are readers and writers in diaspora meant to reconcile our own absence from folkloric canon?

In answer to these questions, we will read a small selection of flash and short stories by Sequoia Nagamatsu, K-Ming Chang, Sofia Samatar, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Sheena Raza Faisal, and others. With a prompt and free writing time built into each session, participants could have the beginnings of eight new stories by the end of the course. Each writer will have one workshop of either a single short story or a suite of three pieces of flash.

This 8-week course will meet on Tuesdays at 7:00 PM–9:30 PM ET from April 12th– 31st. This workshop is open to all writers of color with a scholarship spot available. There’s limited space to enroll; see the class page for more information!

To see all of our fall and spring classes, visit kundiman.org/online-classes.