Dana Curtis /

March 16, 2022

Dana Curtis’ third full-length collection of poetry, Wave Particle Duality, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2017. Her second collection, Camera Stellata, was published by CW Books, and her first book, The Body’s Response to Famine, won the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Elixir Press and lives in Denver, Colorado.

I spent my childhood reading every fairy tale I could get my hands on. As I’ve grown older, and as “happily ever after” seems less likely, they have become that much more important. We need our fairy tales. We need our mythology and fantasy. As we read and interpret, it becomes even more important. I can’t escape fairy tales, and why would I want to? Our beautiful, dark stories have influenced my poetry and my life—although I’m not sure exactly how to define either. Original fairy tales are almost always dark and frightening, and it is only by confronting this that we defeat what is dark and frightening in the real world. Of course, the interpretation of the “real world” is often more challenging than any story we choose to tell.