Fairy tales were the weapon Scheherazade wielded for 1001 nights to stop a murderous caliph and heal his broken heart.
Fairy tales were the voice of the household staff against the master of the house when justice was lacking.
Fairy tales were the subversive tool of the storyteller to speak truth to power.
Whether you are seeking new fairy tale inspiration to breathe life into your creative projects, or if you’re wrestling with a tale within you that must be told, this workshop and community will help inspire, guide, and support your writing journey.
With Scheherazade as our guide, we will wind our way through fairy tale motifs, oral storytelling tools and mnemonic devices that shape the way we expect fairy tales to sound, and the various interpretations and meanings of the tales we all know best.
How would you like to weave a little magic with me?
This workshop builds on Alicia K. Anderson’s successful writing workshops with Morbid Anatomy and other creative writing groups and venues.
This intensive program includes thirteen weekly zoom calls each Monday. Each call will include:
- Lecture materials about fairy tales and storytelling traditions
- One deep dive into a single tale regarding motifs, structure, interpretation, and variants
- Dedicated time for discussion and writing workshops
- Recorded sessions for asynchronous participation.
On Wednesday and Friday each week, recipients will receive emails and prompts to inspire new ideas, or to help inform the stories they are actively working on.
Throughout the process, recipients will receive PDFs, handouts, further reading and other resources to help with common craft questions, fairy tales they are working on, editing tips, structure tips, and more.
The zoom calls will allow for story workshopping with peers in a safe, supportive container, but the workshop also includes up to two optional coaching sessions with the instructor.
Is this Workshop for YOU?
The workshop has the flexibility to help writers of varying degrees of experience and confidence. If you have a story you’d like to work on, and receive feedback about, then this workshop is likely to be useful for you.
You don’t even have to have a draft ready to submit! The first few weeks will be dedicated to exercises that help us find our ways into stories to begin the drafting process.
Conversely, if you have a stockpile of stories that need beta readers and feedback, this longer series of workshops might be great to hone and revise your existing inventory.
The lecture materials and prompts will be fairy tale specific, but your work may not look anything like a fairy tale. Many forms of memoir and fiction are informed by these stories, without being “fairy tales” themselves.
While the weekly workshops can only focus on works of up to 5,000 words at a time, excerpts of larger pieces (novels, screenplays) can be addressed. It is recommended that an outline of larger works accompany the excerpts when submitting them to the group for review.
Spin a Little Magic Writing Workshop Details
Dates: Zoom sessions will be on Mondays January 11 – April 5, 2027, prompts and emails will be sent out Wednesdays and Fridays each of those weeks.
Price: Early bird registration is $650 before December 11, 2026. Full price registration is $800 before January 11, 2027. Last day to sign up is January 11, 2027.
Limits: In order to ensure that everyone’s work gets attention and care, this workshop is limited to 20 participants, on a first-come, first-serve basis.
About The Instructor
Alicia K. Anderson has been writing fairy tale and myth retellings since 2014. Her work has been published by several small presses and magazines. She has also published her collection of fairy tale retellings and original fairy tales through Oneiroglossy Press.
Anderson’s dissertation was on the Storyteller Archetype, and oral storytelling traditions around the world. This intensive research was like investigating an ancient tapestry with a magnifying glass. She was able to see the warp and weft, and how each fiber was spun prior to being woven into the larger whole. With this view, she also understood how we, as modern storytellers, should be writing our own reimaginings of these tales.
Anderson has been participating in writing workshops since the late 1990s, and has been in her share of terrible ones. Without an agreement of community care, and without familiarity and camaraderie among participants, it’s easy for workshops to be uncomfortable and even painful places. To that end, she focuses the workshops that she leads on creating a safe container for all participants. She wishes to ensure that everyone feels supported and encouraged, even while receiving well-meant constructive criticism.