The Laina Project is a poetry collection that reinterprets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in a "hero's journey" story format. It is my project for the 2015 National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge.
This project started in Fall 2010, when I was trying to decide on an approach for my Creative Writing project for my British Literature I class. The project involved writing something creative that was an approach to a text we had read in class, and I had chosen The Canterbury Tales as my text.
I had proposed three different approaches -- a modern-day high school story, a "hero's journey"-type story, or a sci-fi police procedural -- to my teacher. But I couldn't decide which one to move forward with!
So I decided to write something for each one of them, and then decide. And thus the story of Laina was born. One afternoon in the Reading Room of my university's library, I sat down and wrote a 6-page poem called "The Warlock's Tale," based off of "The Pardoner's Tale" (one of the more well-known tales in The Canterbury Tales). Because I had recently encountered the alexandrine style while writing a paper for another class on Molière's Tartuffe, I decided to write the poem in that style. The meter for writing alexandrines in English is typically iambic hexameter, so I stuck to that rhythm, although I did not rhyme my lines as Molière did (this results in a rather singsong feel, as I discovered when reading some of the original French text of the play). I also used more archaic language to fit with the fantasy feel I wanted to create.
I ended up not choosing the poem about Laina for the assignment, but I kept the poem anyway, and later tried workshopping it in a writing workshop club I was part of. The response was mixed; most didn't quite get it because of the more traditional style (the members of the club were mostly more modern writers), but this one girl, who like me was more traditional, did note its similarity to "The Tale of the Three Brothers" from Harry Potter, which is also based off "The Pardoner's Tale."
Since then, though, I have not done anything with it, and I figured it was worth trying to develop for my first attempt at NaPoWriMo. I have never played around with the traditional "hero's journey" structure before, so that will be a first for me as well. I actually found that following that structure has helped greatly with plotting Laina's story.
I hope that you will all enjoy following Laina's story this month!
This project started in Fall 2010, when I was trying to decide on an approach for my Creative Writing project for my British Literature I class. The project involved writing something creative that was an approach to a text we had read in class, and I had chosen The Canterbury Tales as my text.
I had proposed three different approaches -- a modern-day high school story, a "hero's journey"-type story, or a sci-fi police procedural -- to my teacher. But I couldn't decide which one to move forward with!
So I decided to write something for each one of them, and then decide. And thus the story of Laina was born. One afternoon in the Reading Room of my university's library, I sat down and wrote a 6-page poem called "The Warlock's Tale," based off of "The Pardoner's Tale" (one of the more well-known tales in The Canterbury Tales). Because I had recently encountered the alexandrine style while writing a paper for another class on Molière's Tartuffe, I decided to write the poem in that style. The meter for writing alexandrines in English is typically iambic hexameter, so I stuck to that rhythm, although I did not rhyme my lines as Molière did (this results in a rather singsong feel, as I discovered when reading some of the original French text of the play). I also used more archaic language to fit with the fantasy feel I wanted to create.
I ended up not choosing the poem about Laina for the assignment, but I kept the poem anyway, and later tried workshopping it in a writing workshop club I was part of. The response was mixed; most didn't quite get it because of the more traditional style (the members of the club were mostly more modern writers), but this one girl, who like me was more traditional, did note its similarity to "The Tale of the Three Brothers" from Harry Potter, which is also based off "The Pardoner's Tale."
Since then, though, I have not done anything with it, and I figured it was worth trying to develop for my first attempt at NaPoWriMo. I have never played around with the traditional "hero's journey" structure before, so that will be a first for me as well. I actually found that following that structure has helped greatly with plotting Laina's story.
I hope that you will all enjoy following Laina's story this month!