Matthew Salesses with Laura van den Berg: Craft in the Real World

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Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. This groundbreaking manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.

Here, Salesses rediscovers plot, character, conflict, structure, and believeability for an audience and an author beyond the canonized white male. Upending Western notions of how a story must progress, Salesses rethinks craft and the teaching of it as an invitation of diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces.

Matthew Salesses is the author of three novels, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, The Hundred-Year Flood, and I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, and a forthcoming essay collection. He was adopted from Korea and currently lives in Iowa.

Moderator Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a Best Book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her most recent book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection of stories, was published by FSG in July. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.

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