WE BUILD IT OURSELVES
SINCE the rise of European empires, BIPOC writers around the world have created a strong legacy of literary works that resist a Euro-American aesthetic of “good” storytelling. In more recent history, with the institutionalization of writing in the United States, or the MFA—one of the country’s fastest growing graduate degrees, a key incubator of winners of the most prestigious literary awards, and, slowly but surely, a global pedagogical export—American literary culture has developed its distinctive trademark, full of silent assumptions and legitimizing power toward what constitutes good storytelling.
I spoke with three writers—Felicia Rose Chavez, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Matthew Salesses—who have been very vocal about how this literary scene has stifled historically oppressed writers, especially via the writing workshop, and of ways to decolonize art-making. Chavez and Salesses recently published books on the subject, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Haymarket Books, 2021) and Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (Catapult, 2021), respectively, and Nguyen has critiqued the workshop in pieces such as his 2017 op-ed for the New York Times, “Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile.” Through his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), and its 2021 sequel, The Committed, both anticolonial fiction about American and French empires, Nguyen also circles back to that BIPOC legacy of storytelling that proactively questions what one is taught within a traditional American writing workshop.
Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Haymarket Books, 2021) and coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020). Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as the Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access and add to a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color, visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in the United States. He is the author of The Committed (Grove Press, 2021), which continues the story of The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes. He is the editor of the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (Abrams, 2018), and also the author of the story collection The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017) and the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
was adopted from Korea. He is the author of, among other titles, the (Little A, 2020), the best-sellers (Catapult, 2021) and (Little A, 2015), and two forthcoming books from Little, Brown. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University.
