The New, Weirdly Racist Guide to Writing Fiction - Tablet Magazine

Since its 2021 publication, Craft in the Real World has attained immense popularity in the tiny world of graduate creative writing programs. On Twitter, other writers of color gushed about this book to me, saying it “opens your brain” and “decolonizes storytelling.” Its author, Matthew Salesses, was a professor at Oklahoma State when the book was published, but has since taken up a teaching position in one of America’s most prestigious training grounds for fiction professionals, Columbia University’s MFA program in creative writing. Salesses has also become a magnet for controversy: One of his Columbia Aniversity syllabi went viral several weeks ago (to both criticism and applause) because it requires graduate students in his workshop to name the gender and race of their characters upon “first introduction.” But what does it mean to decolonize storytelling? In practice, a new strain of unease has crept into the discourse within writing workshops. This unease primarily manifests in a ve

Since its 2021 publication, Craft in the Real World has attained immense popularity in the tiny world of graduate creative writing programs. On Twitter, other writers of color gushed about this book to me, saying it “opens your brain” and “decolonizes storytelling.” Its author, Matthew Salesses, was a professor at Oklahoma State when the book was published, but has since taken up a teaching position in one of America’s most prestigious training grounds for fiction professionals, Columbia University’s MFA program in creative writing. Salesses has also become a magnet for controversy: One of his