Almost nothing you are taught about setting, character, voice, or structure in MFA classes or craft essays applies to the fairy tale form. And yet the form endures.
Here I defer to Kate Bernheimer, a great contemporary scholar (and writer) of fairy tales who outlines four qualities in her essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairytale.
Flatness—specifically flatness of character.
Abstraction—
minimalism of description
Intuitive logic—essentially a dream logic or poetic logic
Normalized magic—probably self-explanatory: magic is normalized
Open artifice—fairy tales eschew the standard methods of hiding fictional artifice and instead present themselves as pure story.
present themselves as pure story
narrators often interject commentary or address the reader
A non-setting—fairy tales typically take place in a vague non-setting, in which we are never pinned down in specific time periods or locations
Although Americans raised on Brothers Grimm might think of this non-setting as being always a vague medieval world, the non-setting can take place any time (so to speak) including far future science fiction settings or the present day as long as we don’t pin the setting down too neatly. “
Listing the features of fairy tales in the way above, you can probably can see the different ways fairy tales overlap with other modes of storytelling. The normalized magic and intuitive logic is present in magical realism.
ubmit a previously unpublished, full-length poetry manuscript with a table of contents. There is no mandatory page count. We suggest in the area of 48 to 88 p
include a single cover page with the title of the manuscript only, so that your manuscript document remains anonymous
Kindly note that poets who have personal relationships, current or recent student-teacher or mentoring relationships with the contest judge, or who have attended a program at the same time that the contest judge served on faculty, are not eligible