Matthew Salesses is an award-winning novelist and essayist. He is the author of seven books, including the national bestseller Craft in the Real World and the PEN/Faulkner finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. Forthcoming in January is a new novel, The Sense of Wonder. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University.
Matthew Salesses joined American University students and faculty for an evening of discussion on craft, wonder, and the importance of being seen. Salesses read excerpts from his forthcoming novel, The Sense of Wonder. Inspired by his love of basketball and K-dramas, the novel follows Won, the first Asian American player in the NBA, and Carrie, a TV producer trying to bring Korean television dramas to the states. The two struggle to find their place amongst the American sports and media, all the while chasing the wonder that comes with finally achieving a dream that had previously been kept off-limits to them.
Salesses remarked that after losing his wife to cancer, what he needed more than ever was what the novel seeks to embody—wonder. He noted that a lot of the novel was inspired by the feeling he got seeing Jeremy Lin, the real-life first Asian American NBA player: the feeling that “we could be anything.” The Sense of Wonder emphasizes not only the importance of diversity and inclusion in media, but the cruciality of well-rounded, sensitive, and nuanced representation. Salesses explores this not only within the story of the characters, but within the novel itself—it, too, must be well-rounded and nuanced in its representation. The days of accepting less than what one deserves because they’re starved for representation of themselves in media are over; it begins with books like Salesses’s.
“On the page, we have agency,” Salesses remarked while answering student questions. He noted that often, writers are those with the least agency in their lives, so they seek to exercise that agency through storytelling. This was some of his key advice to the writers in the audience: writing is about choice. The choice of what to tell the reader versus what to keep hidden, the choices each protagonist makes along each new journey, the choice to write at all—every step of the process is a choice. Salesses is choosing to demand better representation of Asian Americans with his work, demanding that stories like his be told.
The Sense of Wonder will be available coming January 2023. Thank you, Matthew Salesses, for choosing to spend an evening with the American University community
Written by: Michelle Ott
Image courtesy of American University
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