February 08, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Greta Patterson
Matthew Salesses, a Korean American fiction writer, read from his book, “The Sense of Wonder,” while visiting Colorado College as part of the Mellon Grant. As Salesses read, it became clear that his way of understanding fiction writing is unusual. Salesses recounted that he has never been one to shy away from pushing against the binaries fiction writing often presents, which he began to understand during his undergraduate fiction writing workshops.
Pushing against these binaries reminds him that academia has always centered the white male as the inherent audience. The notion of writing, especially in fiction writing classes, is often shaped around the belief of shared assumptions through race, gender, religion and sexuality which has only come into conversation in recent years.
“A Sense of Wonder” originated out of Salesses’ two major loves: basketball and K-pop. The book is unique in format, with the narrative in the first half centering around a basketball player while the second half follows a studio producer. Both Asian-American characters learn that navigating the world of sports and entertainment is not going to be easy, especially as they look at their white colleagues and come to realize that they are not being faced with the same criticisms. “The book is joining in a conversation that Asian-American literature has been having for a long time,” Salesses says, and is “a resistance of western psycho realism.”
Salesses’ other work, “Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping,” comes into play not only with “A Sense of Wonder” but anything he writes. In this book, Salesses says, “to learn craft is to learn how to use cultural expectations to your advantage,” which helps reimagine the ways we have learned the craft of writing.
By imagining a way to use cultural expectations to a writer’s advantage, Salesses joins the conversation of redefining terms that have historically been exclusionary. “Craft in the Real World” should be read by both students and teachers to recognize and resist the ways in which English has historically been presented, especially at schools like CC.
With this resistance comes an idea that Salesses describes as “okayness,” or thinking how a character can defy expectations in a way that doesn’t assume resistance. Salesses reminds us that “no fiction exists in a vacuum,” and to see it as such would do an injustice to the work.
As Salesses spoke to the crowd in Cornerstone, I found myself thinking about what this means to us as students at CC. How can we approach English or writing classes in a way that stays true to our voice while recognizing that unseen biases exist in written works?
In Introduction to Literary Theory, we are introduced to the historical canons that English literature has been read through, yet the inherently exclusionary nature of such canons must be recognized as we move into the future of English studies. Thus, it is vital to continue to question, to subvert expectations, to educate ourselves and to understand how we as students can reimagine the world of writing.