First Article Submitted

Well, I've sent my first essay to College English. Twice now, actually. The first time, the editor asked me to revise the intro before he sent it on to his readers. And he was right. It needed work. Below is the intro as it reads now. Wish me luck, internet. :)

Creative Writing Literacy:
 Social Boundaries of an Academic Discipline

Many scholars have observed that the discipline of creative writing has yet to make many of the advances that its counterpart—the discipline of rhetoric and composition—has made over the past few decades. While creative writing, by and large, continues to treat writing as a product, particularly the product of “talent” or “genius” rather than historical contingencies, rhetoric and composition has learned first to treat writing as a process rather than a product and subsequently to situate this process in its social and historical contexts. A number of scholars have worked to bring these insights to creative writing (see for example: Bizarro, Haake, Bishop and Ostrom, Leahy); their work thus far has focused mostly on applying the framework of “process theory” to creative writing pedagogy. A few voices, however, have called for work that brings creative writing fully up-to-date with composition. For example, Peter Vandenberg predicts a future for creative writing theory that encompasses “Postprocess theory.” This theory, says Vandenberg, would study creative writing “as a function of the places where it is learned as well as where it is deployed” (108). Similarly, Tim Mayers, in a recent issue of College English, envisions a future for the discipline in which “practical knowledge of (and facility with) the composition of fiction, poetry, and other so-called creative genres” will be incorporated into “a more general intellectual framework concerning literacy itself” (225).

In the present essay, I want to take these calls seriously by treating creative writing as a kind of literacy, a social practice that involves reading and writing. The situation I’m most concerned with here is creative writing as it is practiced and theorized in the American university. Many scholars have noted the growing influence of academic creative writing over American letters. Mark McGurl comments wryly on this phenomenon in his study of the influence of the academy on American postwar fiction when he observes that “colleges and universities are now...where most “serious writers” (of which there is now an oversupply)...are trained” (x). As McGurl and others have discovered, contemporary academic creative writing is more or less synonymous with the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and its masters in fine arts (MFA) issuing affiliates (The Program Era 25). Since it was founded in 1967 by 15 writers representing 12 programs, the AWP has grown exponentially to a total of 822 degree-conferring creative writing programs, 500 colleges and universities participating as institutional members, and thousands of individual members in 2009 (Fenza). The growth and expanding influence of academic creative writing coupled with the lack of hard academic work in the discipline has led to a situation in which popular practices have become codified in AWP policy without the benefit of rigorous scrutiny by academics.

Without the input of “postprocess” theory or the ability to place classroom and institutional practices in the “framework” of “literacy itself,” AWP programs continue to conduct the teaching of creative writing as if they existed in an ahistorical void where the social realities of race, class, and gender have no say. Only a serious study of the social realities surrounding academic creative writing can provide the perspective necessary to critique and correct whatever problems there may be in common practices and/or AWP policy. Though it is true that some scholars remain optimistic about the social consequences of academic creative writing (see, for example, McGurl on the development of “High Cultural Pluralism,” and Mary Ann Cain on the “counterhegemonic potential” of creative writing as a discipline), it remains the case that the AWP and its affiliates enjoy a position of unchallenged authority over the education of literary writers in the United States, and so it seems to me that only good can result from asking a few simple questions about the literacy practices of these programs.

In the pages that follow, I treat creative writing in the academy as a situated practice and analyze that practice through the lens of literacy studies. I find that factors like race and class are strong determiners of success for academic creative writers. Further, such factors are more often than not the source of labels like “talent,” which are applied to successful creative writers in the academy. In other words, the discipline of creative writing in the US tends to select students based on their familiarity with white, middle- and upper-class literacy practices, and then assigns labels like “creative,” “talented,” or even “genius” to those writers who adhere most closely to these practices. I find that this situation is perpetuated by the relationship that the AWP and its affiliated programs maintain with the American book market. An analysis of this relationship reveals that the common practice in AWP programs of insisting on “literary” work from students, as well as the restrictions the market places upon the term “literary,” not only limit student work but also effectively determine who is allowed to become a “creative writer” in the United States.