I went to the Chapbook Fest at the CUNY grad center on Monday night. It was nice to see Aria there, I think I got to know her a little better. It wasn't really busy, but I got there towards the end, so I'm guessing that's why. Aria and I met a creepy guy that was obsessed with the New School (and Aria's hair line).
But anyway, I wanted to share a great serendipitous moment I had while I was there. I went to the 'breakroom' to hear some of the continuous poetry reading by published small press poets. The lady who was reading when I first walked in was Lana Hechtman Ayers. She was reading from her book, What Big Teeth: Red Riding Hood's Real Life. I'm calling this serendipitous because I am infatuated with authors who 'pervert' fairy tales. Ayers poems were somewhat like diary entries from Little Red while she is growing up. Some of the ones she read were, "Red Riding Hood as Wild Child," "Red Riding Hood at 16," and "Red Riding Hood loses her Virginity." I am currently working on a project about Hansel and Gretel, focusing on puberty under the circumstances of parental abandonment. I'm considering incorporating incest too, but I'm feeling a little too timid to add it in yet. So, I'm writing this because I think everyone should be aware of all the great things people are doing/have done with fairy tales. For example, Anne Sexton "Transformations," Robert Coover "Pricksongs & Descants" (and many, many more) and Angela Carter "The Bloody Chamber" (like Coover, she has many more too.) There's something that fascinates me about changing such common stories, or uses peoples preconceived notions of fairy tales to deceive them. Is this a possible prompt? Yeah, maybe. If anyone is interested in this, I've got a whole bibliography of sources from philosophy, linguistics, to creative writing. It's also good to just start with Grimms' fairy tales- the annotated ones are on Google Books. I like to reread them and see what I've managed to remember, or what I've managed to make up since I was a kid.
