Book Club Announcement: The Wild Swans

Once upon a time, in a dark basement office that is not so gloomy as one might think, a writer read a fairy tale that changed the writer’s life.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration. The fairy tale probably did not change the writer’s life, at least not the whole of it. But fairy tales can be like that, having a way of heightening focus on an element of a story to make it larger than life, like a perilous forest or a gleaming castle or an enchanted small something or other. It is probably more true to say that the fairy tale read in the dark but not gloomy basement office offered another way of seeing, perhaps provided a way to frame a matter.

Fairy tales were meant to do this, I believe.

In a short while, National Poetry Month will be upon us. We have some fun plans in store, but first, we invite you to participate in poetry’s annual ball by reading a fairy tale with us. We’ll be reading a delightful retelling of the classic fairy tale The Wild Swans, by Jackie Morris. You’ll find the story poetic in its way (and perhaps it will even inspire you to reframe your own matter).

Join us in reading The Wild Swans, and then come meet us in the comments on April 12 and April 19 to use the story as a prompt and write poems to the fairy tale or make found poems with Morris’s words.

Buy The Wild Swans now

Photo by Peter Kaminski, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down.

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