PSNY Virtual Workshop: Folklore as Form

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Rachel Isaacs Allen!

Folklore as Form explores the enduring influence of folklore and fairy tales as formal structures in contemporary poetics. Using Kate Bernheimer’s seminal essay Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale as our critical foundation, participants will examine how fairy tale motifs provide a lineage of form, artistic dexterity, and structural possibilities applicable across genres. The lecture will cover Bernheimer's four elements of traditional fairy tales, how they can be adapted and reinvented through structure and motifs in modern poetry. As participants explore cross-stylistic techniques in Bernheimer, Angela Carter, Ann Carson, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to enrich their poetic practice, they will generate original work through free writing and the prompts provided as guidance.

About the Instructor: Rachel Isaacs Allen is a Punjabi-Irish writer and educator from California. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA candidate at Brooklyn Writer’s Foundry. A 2025 and 2026 Barbara Germack Fellow, Rachel is an editor of The Foundry Review and organizes TBR: An emerging Writer Reading Series. Her poetic obsessions are cross-cultural mythology and memory, duality and identity performance. Read her work featured in Across the Margins, A Curious Moon, and her website Rachelisaacsallen.com.

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**