This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."

Etchings in the Ether unfolds during a rain-lashed October evening on Vancouver Island's peninsula. Nearly three-hundred people gather at a rural Catholic school to hear charismatic author/physicist David Shaftesbury expound his gloriously anthropic principle of the universe. Even the local bishop is in attendance. Most have come simply to reinforce religious convictions. Some, like plumber Arthur Boorman, his family destroyed by an act of mindless violence, have come in search of solace and hope. Only one man, cynical sociology professor Charles Meade, sits in open judgement. A Stealth-like aircraft descends through the downpour. It settles onto the playing field behind the school. Robed figures disembark, beings who, though dying from the ravages of a relentless virus, have made a desperate journey across the galaxy to relay a fantastic message to the people of Earth. The physicist/evangelist and the entire audience are held captive, forced to listen while an alien intelligence outlines a terrifying reality behind life, evolution, form and behavior. The sadly repetitive human propensity for self-induced misery is all too explicitly explained. Even seemingly inexplicable phenomena such as school shootings are reduced to an immutable logic. A logic leaving no apparent room in the universe for God. A message is passed. The third and final act begins.

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