I’d been a house painter before I became a poet. 

When I entered the MFA pro­gram at Cornell, therefore, I under­stood with some clarity, I thought, what my work there would entail. The planing and polishing of line, the shaping of poetic structure, the tinting of tone—this was work I’d been doing for years, albeit in a different medium, and I came to relish the image of myself, no doubt hubristically, as a worker in the gouache and gesso of language. 

“Craft” we called that work, a metaphor, of course, which carries over the experience of manual labor into the mystical and elusive procedures of art. 

As a working-class student from the rural Midwest, I felt out of place in many ways at Cornell, where my peers had matriculated from other Ivy League schools and where students and faculty alike wielded terms like “Westchester County” and “key bump” and “i-banker” with a fluency that eluded me. But work made sense to me, as sometimes little else did at Cornell. Work I had always under­stood. Work I could work with. 

* 

As recent scholars of creative writing have recognized, the craft pedagogies I encountered at Cornell were hardly unique, nor were they original to the post-2000 explosion in creative writing MFA, PhD, and low-residency programs. 

Figurations of writing as work have been integral to the discipline of creative writing since its incep­tion. Tracing the institutional pres­ence of writing craft to the found­ing of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936, Mark McGurl argues in The Program Era that instruction in craft techniques—among them structure, texture, tone, tension, and line—constituted part of a broader effort to promote mod­ernist “impersonality” over and against the kinds of self-expression associated with Romanticism. Iowa graduate Flannery O’Connor, most famously, with her fiction’s efficient narrative structure and disciplined prose, embodies what McGurl calls a “masochistic aesthetics of institutional­ization,” an aesthetic in which writing craft holds the whip, as it were, to the erstwhile expressive artist.

Alert to the potential shortcomings of such an anti-expressive pedagogy, and spurred on by broader social and cultural transformations, teachers and students of creative writing have begun to reconsider its implications for more socially oriented or identi­ty-based writing. If craft discourses rely in part on the mediation of indi­vidual expression—always shaped by, channeled through, and articulated via disciplinary techniques—such dis­courses necessarily abstract from and homogenize embodied experience. “Race, gender, sexuality, etc. affect our lives and so must affect our fiction,” Matthew Salesses urges in Craft in the Real World, admonishing writers to “take craft out of some imaginary vac­uum… and return it to its cultural and historical context.” McGurl reasons similarly. “First person may have been suspect [for its] lack of impersonality,” he writes, “but the appeal of speaking for oneself, or of having one’s voice heard, is obvious when it is considered as … political self-representation.” More generally, writers like Barrett Watten, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr have criticized the separation of craft peda­gogies from overarching critical, social, and theoretical conversations. “[C]raft is not what’s at stake,” Clover and Spahr write in their polemic “The 95cent Skool.” “So, no endless condensing. No polishing bannisters. No lapidary work at all.” And panels from the 2021 con­ference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs extend these lines of thinking, dedicated as such panels were to subjects like “Beyond Prescriptivism: Finding Our Own Paths to Creativity” and “Making the Grade: How to Reduce Inherent Bias in Evaluating Creative Writing.” As these arguments recognize, craft-based pedagogies have contributed at times to a uniform and overly conventional poetry culture, one comprised of what David Dooley calls “workshop lyrics” and what Donald Hall satirizes as the “McPoem … of Hamburger University.”

In addition, however, to delimiting the expression of student-writers and homogenizing much of American poetry, craft-based pedagogies have worked quite materially to consolidate the authority of elite educational insti­tutions. For the establishment across the 20th century of what Peter Drucker has termed a corporatized “knowledge economy” depended to a large degree on the expropriation of technical knowledge formerly the province of craft laborers. As new forms of abstract, administrative, or professional-mana­gerial labor emerged alongside complex economic enterprises, craft ways of making and knowing were stripped away, a process facilitated by the cre­ative writing workshop. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—lin­guistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of work, craft pedagogies dismantle and reconstruct craftsman­ship in a lexicon falsely nostalgic for practices the university itself has helped to render obsolete. The workshop poem or short story, this is to say, shares rhetorical space with the craft IPA or artisanal NFT or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—in this space, one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the lan­guage of populism.

To understand these procedures—how the university mobilizes craft as part of what Christopher Findeisen calls its “symbolic class warfare”—we might ask what it means to conceive of the writing classroom as a “workshop” in the first place, with all that that term entails. Despite growing scholarly inter­est in creative writing, the discipline’s central practice and sole institutional form has remained invisible before our eyes. Why has this been the case? Where is the work on workshop? For there is nothing inherent in creative writing that precludes students from practicing it in a “salon” or “studio” or “seminar.” There is nothing in the discipline that necessitates craft-based pedagogies over approaches based on affective response or literary history or even poetic theory. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, howev­er, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? What is at stake in the figuration of literary production as craft labor?

*

The first use of “workshop” to describe a course in creative writing occurred at Harvard University in 1912, when drama professor George Pierce Baker established an institution for the writing and production of plays which he named, advisedly, the 47 Workshop. “That is what it seems to me we could call our experiment,” Baker wrote to one student. “‘Experimental Theatre’ seems to me too grand.” 

No avant-garde insurrection, Baker’s pedagogy was serious labor in stagecraft, part of an American Arts and Crafts movement with which Baker was close­ly affiliated. Specifically, Baker adapted a “craft ideal” which maintained that the worker’s expressive labor should at the same time adhere fastidiously to technical standards like those enforced by preindustrial guilds. For Baker, the self-expression of the playwright would be tempered by the collective labor of the workshop itself, with work commit­tees regulating everything from make-up and set design to prompting, acting, and ushering. Workshop productions were further subjected to intensive technical critique from their audiences, the members of which were selected only after rigorous screening. “I am trying to move heaven and earth to get two tickets to the 47 Workshop play for this week,” a Mrs. Walter B. Kahn wrote Baker in 1921, “and I have been told that to achieve this stupendous result you are the only person to turn to.” With regrets, Baker declined. Though organized around an anti-expressive ideology, the 47 Workshop, like many other Arts and Crafts initiatives, lev­ied a profound critique of established economic and educational regimes, disrupting a utilitarian curriculum geared in large part toward churning out professional-managerial workers. At the same time, the Workshop served as a proving ground for well-crafted dra­matic productions that might supplant the commercial fare of Broadway, then characterized by hackneyed narratives and sentimental melodrama. In unpub­lished lecture notes, Baker repeatedly stresses that “the play’s the thing,” suc­cinctly articulating his view of drama as a constructive process—as “stagecraft” in every sense of that word. 

While McGurl, Salesses, and oth­ers trace craft pedagogies to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then, the tempering of expression through craft in fact dates to a genre since expelled from standard creative writing curricula, the drama, as well as to an American Arts and Crafts movement whose influence on higher education has been underappre­ciated. Indeed, contemporary creative writing craft—discussion of syntacti­cal “texture,” for instance—might be considered an abstraction of material practices first institutionalized in the Arts and Crafts movement, as might the structure of the writing workshop itself. As craft sociologist Richard Sennett explains, “In a workshop, the skills of the master can earn him or her the right to command, and learning from and absorbing those skills can dignify the apprentice or journeyman’s obedience.” The master of the writing workshop, of course, is the published author who serves as instructor, a figure whose charismatic presence, not to mention cultural cachet and professional con­nections, can “dignify” by association the work of his or her students. And the way student-writers demonstrate their expertise is the MFA thesis, akin to the masterpiece by which craft apprentic­es attained journeyman status. Even such a notorious shibboleth as “show don’t tell” originates in the protoindus­trial workshop, as the master’s visual demonstration provides a model for the apprentice’s work.

Despite Baker’s practice of dramatic craft within a workshop setting, how­ever, and despite the proliferation of craft-based workshops after him, the historical institution from which the 47 Workshop drew its name rarely witnessed the kind of labor that Baker promoted. Mistakenly associated with earlier forms of guild craftsmanship, the protoindustrial workshop of the 18th and 19th centuries marked a transition between hand craftsmanship and the alienated work of the factory; in many cases workshop labor was characterized by machine production, thorough subdivision of labor, and employee management practices strikingly remi­niscent of later economic eras. A mixed metaphor at the very heart of creative writing, the association of workshops with craft labor seems particularly misleading given the role of higher education in suppressing earlier, more holistic work practices. As labor histo­rian Michael Denning explains, “Not only did the Taylorism of modernity accentuate the division between … mental and manual labor, but it created entire industries and classes built on ‘mental labor’ and the appropriation of the skills of the craftworker.” The creative writing workshop may be the clearest example of this appropriation; it is no accident, after all, that the dis­cipline of creative writing exploded at precisely the moment the university consolidated its influence over the American economy—such workshops served efficiently in their dual function of promoting professional-managerial values while transcoding those values in craft lexicons.

That an American institution has figured prominently in the legitimation of social difference would hardly be remarkable, of course, were it not for the positioning of creative writing as somehow antithetical to an otherwise professional-managerial curriculum, as socially neutral, good old-fashioned work. A crucial vehicle for this rhetoric has been the creative writing “craft book,” that text which, ubiquitous in graduate and undergraduate workshops, guides students toward authorship by providing instruction in and examples of distinct craft techniques; many of the most influential craft books of the MFA era invoke manual labor as an analog for literary composition, from Mary Oliver’s comparison of the poet to a “bricklayer or any worker—even a brain surgeon” to John Hollander’s punning observation that “in couplets, one line often makes a point / Which hinges on its bending, like a joint.” More than ancillary metaphors, such figurations embody core principles within postwar and contemporary writers’ otherwise unique poetic ideologies. One of the more telling figurations of this line of thought comes from Roy Peter Clark’s 2006 craft book Writing Tools, in which Clark outlines “the disastrous conse­quences of bad writing in America—for businesses, professions, educators, con­sumers and citizens.”

Poorly written reports, memos, announcements, and messages cost us time and money. … The Commission calls for a ‘revolution’ in the way Americans think about writing. The time is right. … We need lots of writing tools to build a nation of writers. Here are fifty of them, one for every week of the year. You get two weeks for vacation.

What makes texts like Clark’s such powerful instruments in the crafting of class relations is not only that they justify social difference as professional technique, but that they disguise the operation of economic capital as cultur­al distinction. As Pierre Bourdieu notes of mass-produced couture craft—YETI coolers and Pendleton blankets might be conspicuous examples—“nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthet­ic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common.’” While instructors of creative writing will reminiscence fondly about their most talented stu­dents, these instructors will also tell you that there is hardly anything more “banal or even ‘common’” than the majority of student writing. Yet these same instructors, myself not excepted, continuously idealize that writing as craftsmanship—not paper-filing to­ward a fungible credential, but rigorous construction in language.

As writers and other artists continue to rethink workshop pedagogies, they might bear in mind the slippage in that metaphor, as well as its implications for the wider institutional practice of liter­ary production. Creative writing may indeed prove more culturally distinctive than Systems Engineering or Supply Chain Management, but the vast major­ity of student writers, at the graduate no less than the undergraduate level, both descend from and ultimately find work as professional-managerial laborers—craft pedagogies do not produce poets so much as they produce professionals.

Like many other erstwhile challenges to American capitalism, in other words, writing craft was absorbed and re-articu­lated in academic-cum-corporate form. “Craft, Inc.,” we might call this form. And the industry is booming.

*

The workshop was only one man­ifestation, however, of a widespread fascination with craft rhetoric in the postwar era, with public intellectuals frequently invoking craft as a metaphor for their own knowledge work.

In his 1959 The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills advises sociologists to “let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft.” Balancing expressive labor with scientific technique, Mills’s sociologist embodies an American Arts and Crafts craft ideal and carries it forward into an unexpected context. “The most admira­ble thinkers within the scholarly com­munity … do not split their work from their lives,” Mills insists. “They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation.” Admirable in its invoca­tion of preindustrial work as an anti­dote to modernity, Mills’s white-collar craftsmanship at the same time ensures that mental laborers internalize the professional-managerial ethos of the university. While the protoindustrial workshop did serve, in some cases, as the home of the miller or textile-maker or blacksmith, the obscuring of bound­aries between work and leisure also means that mental laborers, like most university employees, never punch out, that they are susceptible at any moment to the midnight phone call or emergen­cy email. This infiltration of work into every aspect of existence looks far less insidious when it goes by the name of “craftsmanship.”

In this way, Mills’s sociologist figures forth what William H. Whyte three years earlier had called “the organization man,” that figure whose internalization of corporate values—especially a guild-like sense of corporate belonging—was “like nothing so much as the Middle Ages.” As Whyte explains, the challenge for organizations is “to re-create the belongingness of the Middle Ages.”