Craft Is Never Neutral, featuring Matthew Salesses

An episode for our times, today’s show features Matthew Salesses in conversation with Grant and Brooke about his newest book, Craft in the Real World. Listen in as he unpacks the inherent biases of how the dominant culture teaches and writes and thinks about craft. Matthew’s book addresses how and why craft inextricable from identity and lived experience—bringing some explosive new energy to our thinking about craft that’s both empowering and long overdue.

ABOUT MATTHEW SALESSES

Matthew Salesses is the author of the bestseller The Hundred-Year Flood, an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015 and a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29, and Gawker, among others. His latest novel is the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, a Thrillist.com Best Book of 2020, and today we’re going to talk about his book Craft in the Real World, an Esquire Best Book of the 2021, which explores alternative models of craft and the writing workshop, especially for marginalized writers.

Book trend: This week’s book trend about Returns—more a stronghold than a trend, but something all authors need to understand. That book-publishing is a returns-based industry impacts how we need to think about print runs, sales, and inventory.