Throwback Thursday | An AFTER THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER Excerpt: “Little Red Hunting Hood” by M. T. DeSantis

Seriously, this basket gets heavier every time. I enter grandmother’s cottage without knocking. Ten years ago, when I started bringing her food, she told me to just come in. I don’t argue with grandma, and it’s a good thing, considering what happened with the wolf. “Grandma.” I place the basket on the kitchen table. The…

A TRANSCENDENT Excerpt: Kathryn Hore’s “Dark Moon”

By the time the path twists into the forest, the sunlight has gone, leaving no more than the pale light of the waning quarter moon. She is more comfortable with that, with the trees stretching overhead and the darkness buffeted around her. When there is light and space, an open stretch of ground, she can…

Hoodwinked: Tricking students into having fun with fairy tales by Alisha Costanzo

When I was a teaching assistant, I taught an essay called the Adaptation/Variation, which allowed students to choose a text and change it in form, in character, in style, in any variety of means with one task in mind—interpretation. Most often, students chose fairy tales because they were familiar from their youth and had seen…

The Language of Fairy Tales by M. T. DeSantis

It’s often said of Shakespeare’s classics by many modern readers—his stories are timeless, but the language is inaccessible. The same could be said for the original versions of fairy tales. Writing, like any other part of a culture, has evolved. If the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen picked up a modern novel, they’d share…