Blog
Meet the Teaching Artist: Writing From Fairy Tales with Syr Beker
by Writing Workshops Staff
6 months ago
Instructor Syr Beker (they/them) is a captivating storyteller and we are thirlled to be offering their classes at WritingWorkshops.com!
With their book What A Fish Looks Like forthcoming from Stelliform Press and a myriad of stories published by Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, and Fairy Tale Review, Beker's work seamlessly blends the boundaries of reality and the fantastical. As a proud Lambda fellow, Tin House scholar, and Clarion West graduate, their literary prowess extends beyond writing; they co-founded Queer Cat Productions, a theater company championing queer narratives, and serve as an associate editor at Pseudopod.
Beker invites writers of all genres to delve into the timeless magic of fairy tales through their upcoming course, The Woods: Writing From Fairy Tales 4-Week Zoom Intensive for All Genres.
Designed to inspire and liberate, this four-week journey promises a method of writing rooted in fairy tales, a mid-sized draft of a story, poem, or chapter, and countless new entry points into imaginative worlds. Participants will explore the works of literary greats like Helen Oyeyemi and Carmen Maria Machado, alongside fairy tale-adjacent filmmakers and visual artists.
As we sit down with Syr Beker for our Meet the Teaching Artist series, we are eager to unravel their creative process, the inspirations behind their upcoming course, and their thoughts on the enduring allure of fairy tales. Join us as we step into a world where monsters, woods, and weirdness reign supreme, and discover how fairy tales can spark new creative possibilities for writers of all kinds.
Hi, Syr. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Hi! I’m Syr! I’m a writer, immersive designer, and horrorist in search of the queer love language of climate change. I am the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions theater company and my first book is coming out from Stelliform Press in 2025.
For the last ten years, I have been investigating the question of what makes a joyful, generative, collaborative art space through workshops, field trips, events, and one-on-one work. That’s my bio, but here are more interesting facts about me:
1. My cats are Midnight and Chaos, and my ghost cat is Smaug (RIP, Smauggie);
2. In real life, I’m either the quiet listen-y one or the one standing on a table leading people in sea shanties, no middle ground;
3. If you’re in a class with me, you can play a game where you look at my office and count skulls (10pts) cats (5 pts) and tentacles (15 pts). First person who gets to 100 wins a prize.
What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Fairy tales, and I’ll define this category broadly, belong to all of us. Most of us, in some way or another, have been given stories, whether we were fortunate enough to have someone who called themself a storyteller or who opened an actual book called “fairy tales,” or whether we overheard gossip, or were told a secret on the schoolyard. (Who was a storyteller in your life?). We live in an ecosystem of stories, and some of them have been around in the same recognizable form for hundreds of years.
I believe these stories are real, alive, and powerful. I think they carry in them some old magic: about going into the woods (or a wild place) and bringing back knowledge, about how kindness can prevail, about hope that things right themselves in the end, and that there is always a way. I also think they provide a source of endless inspiration.
And they are also ours to inhabit and reimagine. And I think it matters that we do! Because there are forces out there limiting the possibilities of our world. Donna Haraway writes, “It matters what stories story story, it matters what knots knot knots.” As we reinvent the world through stories, fairy tales can provide familiar structures to play with and experiment, a glimpse into a world of possibility, and maybe even a path to a world in which we all belong.
Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
The central question of this class is one we are going to explore together: “How do we (how do I!) write from fairy tales? How do we bring these magical elements, and this fairy tale to our stories? How do we create a process that allows us to inhabit these fairy tales and make them ours, that we can keep using for inspiration and subversion.” And when I use the phrase “for inspiration, subversion, and delight,” this is what I mean: we want to find a place where we feel inspired, where writing feels effortless and joyful.
The exciting news is this: “anything can happen in the woods.”
My role is to create a space of belonging and exploration of fairy tales, and to offer a lot of possibilities, questions, and concepts for people to use to explore what works best for them. I always offer a few options, so people pick what works for them, but here are some things people in my fairy tale class have told me they really loved doing: rewriting fairy tales, going for a walk and fetching something, drawing, writing a song, reading about other writers approaches, telling a story to another person, storyboarding a fairy tale and choosing the part they really loved to write from. There is ALWAYS the option to just write, and we do a lot of that too, and the tools I give are adaptable to other projects.
What was your first literary crush?
This is highly specific, but when I was a teen, I found an old copy of Boris Vian’s book “L’ecume des jours,” (also sometimes called Mood Indigo) which begins with a scene where three or four highly improbable things happen: a piano that makes cocktails, flowers growing in lungs, anthropomorphic mice, objects with personalities. I read one page and wanted to yell “you can do this? They’ll let you?” I came away with the feeling that my world had been made bigger by this book, and that I had been seen.
From there, I went in search of those feelings: “The world is bigger, I feel seen, you can do that?!”
I can trace it in all the books I have loved, from Tamora Pierce’s Lioness Quartet to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad to Franny Choi’s poetry, to Percival Everett’s work. It’s a quality of love, playfulness, and making the world bigger.
What are you currently reading?
I LOVE this question. I am currently reading B. Pladek’s magnificent Dry Land because I want to be immersed in the woods.
As for fairy tales, I love Jasmine Sawers’ The Anchored World (beautiful, hybrid fairy tale reimaginings), Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, and I just preordered Natalia Theodoridou’s Sour Cherry, which begins with the story of Bluebeard, which I got to read a version of in the past. It begins with a variation on bluebeard and then it goes straight for your heart with explosive prose.
How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
That’s a great question! Everyone’s process is different. I know a lot of writers who work on one project at a time, and that’s beautiful and valid.
I tend to have many projects and inspirations going at once, and I love to collaborate, so I always have multiple calendars and spreadsheets and simultaneous productions happening, and I have learned to embrace this process. I work, and encourage people who are like me to work, on what feels most alive and most delightful on any given day, unless there’s a deadline.
As for finishing things, I take advantage of a law of physics that I learned in theater. It’s called “the show must go on,” and it states that “given a sufficiently real deadline (like a public showing), everything will magically resolve itself at the 11th hour.”
If you can trust in the magic of a deadline, you just need to find a deadline out there in the world, like a writing workshop, or a submission call, or a fellowship, or even just telling someone you love and are a little bit afraid of that you’re going to have it done.
Where do you find inspiration?
I believe that inspiration is a sense, or a muscle, that everyone has, and that you can train and strengthen and sharpen.
Here are some things that I know have helped me:
1) any practice that involves slowing down and noticing: walking, cooking, drawing, meditating;
2) any practice that involves delight without expectation of productiveness: watching/reading things because you know you love them, talking to friends, looking at things at a museum or yard sale,
3) any practice of catching or recording things or questions as they glimmer: keeping a notebook, a voice memo, having a friend you talk to about the joys and pettinesses of life,
4) someone else holding an artistic space for me, and giving me creative constraints, like a writing workshop, a zoom co-write with friends.
I love and return to, over and over, this writing exercise that I got from Karen Joy Fowler, and that Kelly Link writes about here: Write a list of things you absolutely love in stories: ghosts, long-lost twins, pirates, secret rooms, Rashomon… Keep this list close, and keep adding to it.
What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
I have received so much good advice! I don’t know where to begin. But the one that stays with me today comes from Luis Alberto Urreals banger of a lecture at Tin House, Hymn to the Broken, in which he quotes the poet Etheridge Knight saying that in art, “you’ve got to be telling someone you love them.”
And what this has done for me is encourage me to revisit everything I write with an eye towards love, whether it’s to someone specific, or to a group, or a concept, or something in nature. Sometimes I even write above and below a story something like “Dear X, I love you…” It prevents me from being too self righteous, or too angry, or too rigid, it makes me want to show up as my best self. It’s also a vulnerable practice, imagining a story as a love letter, even if it’s a horror story, an angry story.
Author and poet CMarie Fuhrman said at AWP 2022, something like “the only purpose of humans is to go out and praise the natural world,” so I have started incorporating plants, fish, habitats in this practice like they are my friends and lovers and community.
What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
This is complicated, because I believe that what we call craft is a highly subjective set of expectations we have inherited that are not always here to serve all of us. I also think that books on craft and writing can be so inspiring. I often say that the whole point of any of this (craft, workshops, learning) is a way to occupy our conscious mind and put us in the way of inspiration.
I think everyone should read, or at least read into, Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, which tells us that what we call craft is often a series of expectations and baggage from a dominant (white, male, western, hetero) perspective, and invites us to think around and beyond them towards defining new ways of telling stories. (If you like that one, try: Joanna Russ’ How To Suppress Womens’ Writing, Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, Felicia Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark).
I think people should avoid books that tell you there is only one correct way to do things, or that lecture you on the proper way to do plot, or the proper way to write a sentence, or that tells you to work harder. If it limits your world, or makes you feel smaller, it’s bad advice.
Beyond that, anything that inspires you can be a craft book. It need only be something that speaks to you and brings you delight.
Here are a few books on writing and art that I have loved and found delight in:
Lynda Barry’s work, especially What it Is, and Syllabus, Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, for the pictures and interviews especially, Charlie Jane Anders’ Never Say You Can’t Survive, Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy. My next read is Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination, A Manifesto.
Bonus question: What’s your teaching vibe?
Eep! I don’t know how to answer this because every person will feel differently about a workshop leader, and that’s ok.
Here are some things I really care about:
1) accessibility, care, and belonging. I spend time on that in every workshop. I believe art spaces should create glimpses of the world we want to see.
2) Delight and play. I believe that writing should be enjoyable and exciting, and that readers can feel that joy and excitement, even if you are writing about hard things;
3) Consent and Options. No one gets put on the spot, no one has to do anything they don’t want to, there is always the invitation to modify things to suit your practice;
4) Community: I have found my favorite people in writing workshops. I want people to know each others’ work.
Here are some things that have meant the world to me in classes I have led: people looking out for one another, people caring for and encouraging one another, exploring new territory, trying new things, articulating concepts they were going for, laughter, delight.
Here is what it feels like to be a workshop leader: we are embarking on a great adventure together. It’s my job to maintain the spaceship, to make sure we have the best snacks, the maps, the most comfortable place to lounge. I have an itinerary. I just cleaned all the windows so we can see into space.
And now we get to stand on the deck of the Enterprise and look at all the stars, and consider all the possible places we can go!
Learn more about working with Syr:
Your can sing up for Syr's upcoming class, The Woods: Writing From Fairy Tales 4-Week Zoom Intensive for All Genres, and avoid the waitlist!
Instructor Syr Beker (they/them) is a speculative fiction writer. Their book What A Fish Looks Like is forthcoming from Stelliform Press. Their stories are found in Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, Spunk, Foglifter, Gigantic Sequins, Home is Where you Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press, 2021), and on ships and in cemeteries and on stages across the bay area. They are proud to be a Lambda fellow, a Tin House scholar, a graduate of Clarion West, and an associate editor at Pseudopod. They are the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions theater company.
