Online Classes

Ever wonder why the movie Barbie became a runaway box office success—a cultural phenomenon breaking records worldwide?

Was it a coincidence that two much acclaimed movies, Barbie and Poor Things, depicted clear motifs of the Heroine’s journey found in well-known, enduring fairy tales?

Both films are about female empowerment; both feature innocents who leave their sheltered, restricted lives and through treacherous interactions with the outside world experience self-actualization and become real.

Want to know how to create a heroine’s journey story with the underlying magnetism of its age-old archetypal patterns?

Gather ‘round the hearth fire circle! Listen to tales of the heroine’s journey told in the style of the oral tradition. Respond in your written voice to create new settings, characters, and plots with surprising depth and appeal.

In this exciting, interactive, three-session workshop with Woven founder Kate Farrell we will:

• Explore the unique challenges of the heroine’s journey found in ancient, feminine fairy tales.
• Learn how to use elements of the feminine quest in your creative writing for any genre—fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and more!
• Compare the hero’s and heroine’s journey and discuss three basic benchmarks of the feminine quest in tales that date back millennia to matriarchal cultures:

  – Treachery: Entanglements and Jealousies
  – Into the Wilderness: Escape and Initiation
  – Return: Recognition and Self-Attainment

• Tap into the primal Slavic tale, “Baba Yaga & Vasilissa the Brave,” a foundational story. We’ll translate its archaic challenges with prompts and writing exercises. We’ll use the narrative arc of the heroine’s journey, its basic motifs, key characters, and tropes to create a new script.

A little background on the Baba Yaga

The Slavic fairy tale, “Baba Yaga and Vasilissa the Brave,” is a heroine’s journey to the ominous dwelling of the most popular and complex character in Russian tales: Baba (meaning Grandmother or old woman) Yaga (some say from the old Russian verb yagat, which means to find fault) who traces her origins to an ancient Slavic shamanic goddess who was the link between life and death.

Baba Yaga represented the Slavic matriarchal society where her tales originated in a pre-Christian era, where for generations folklore and particularly skazki (fairytales) formed an integral part of Slavic life. The Christianization of Russia suppressed folklore as paganism.

Yet in the remnants of Baba Yaga folklore that have survived, she remains a powerful, magical woman, living alone, who rules over elemental forces, dangerous to those whom she deems unworthy.

All workshop details below!