We are all drawn to the surreal worlds of myth and fairy tales. Both the volatility and malleability of these stories—how they retain their form while lending themselves towards an endless process of telling and retelling. They are songs that we never grow tired of hearing: ancient melodies imagined and reimagined ad infinitum. There is a rising trend in myth and fairytale retellings in the current literary landscape and in this course we will dig into why that is, what the risks and benefits are of doing so, as well as what writing techniques we can use to craft our own works. Students will learn to write and revise short fiction retellings while providing meaningful and productive feedback to peers with a mind towards publication. About the Instructor Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a writer and educator. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Northeast Ohio MFA (NEOMFA) consortium and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick. His poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared widely, in Scientific American, Fairy Tale Review, Ninth Letter, Pithead Chapel, PRISM International, and elsewhere. His poetry manuscript, Still, Sometimes, Shipwreck, confronts language loss, cultural disconnect, diasporic identity, and other aspects of home-seeking using a series of persona poems from the perspective of Odysseus. His manuscript was a finalist for the 2025 Alice James Award and the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series. His short story, built from a series of myths and Greek folklore, “The Music of Olena Xiphias”, was runner-up for the 2024 Driftwood Press Adrift Short Story Contest.