Christopher Kempf. Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture

Abstract

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Spurious as this hackneyed dictum is, the valuation that compels it—theory is for those who cannot quite hack practice—nonetheless animates one of the key phenomena documented in Craft Class, Christopher Kempf’s lively new genealogy of the creative writing workshop. What this dictum gives us is one reason why such workshops have endeavoured since the mid-century to ‘transcode professional-managerial soft skills – linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency – in the language of manual labor’ (6): because, with the aid of these expropriated terms, soft theory can be passed off as hard praxis. The language of labour ironically becomes a means of repackaging, for convenient student consumption, an education in ‘the very ethos which had outmoded manual labour in the first place’ (179). Open any writing textbook you might care to name, the argument goes, and you will find an abundance of metaphorical attempts to convince teachers and learners that they are unalienated doers. Of course, for those learners who happen to be students in debt-generating Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programmes—in their 2015 LARB essay, ‘The Program Era and the Mainly White Room’, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young note that over 500 such students graduate each year, more than double the number who do so from fully funded programmes—this educational fantasy comes at a significant cost.