The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Stacey Shubitz and Lynne Dorfman warmly welcome you to experience writing workshop for the first time or in a new light with Welcome to Writing Workshop. Through strategic routines, tips, resources, and short focused video clips, teachers can create the sights and sounds of a thriving writing workshop where: * both students and teachers are working authors * students spend most of their time writing--not just learning about it * student choice is encouraged to help create engaged writers, not compliant ones * students are part of the formative assessment process * students will look forward to writing time--not dread it. From explanations of writing process and writing traits to small-group strategy lessons and minilessons, this book will provide the know-how to feel confident and comfortable in the teaching of writers.

The Writing Workshop Note Book is devoted to making, remaking, and remarking on writing. Animated by a concern about how we relate to our own and others' writing and by a desire to have a felicitous effect on the reader's experience with writing and critiquing? and supported by his experience from decades of leading writing workshops? Ziegler has the following goals for this book;1) It will be useful if you are taking (or thinking of taking) a writing workshop.2) It will benefit workshop teachers.3) It will be a helpful companion to a solitary writer, who can be thought of as a ''workshop of one.''4) It will be pleasant to read! While this book does focus on the workshop experience, it is impossible to truly explore the workshop without dealing with the heart that sustains the workshop's brain; the act of creation. Thus, Part One is concerned with the work that leads to the drafts on the workshop table, and Part Two emphasizes what happens around the table while these drafts are critiqued. The two Parts are not discrete; the issues in Part One often occupy workshop discussion. Teachers of writing do not open up cans of lectures; pedagogy in workshops gets doled out in brief exegeses, organized opportunistically as the work comes across the table. Ziegler replicates this process by arranging the material into notes, which the reader can absorb sequentially or alight on as he flips through the pages.

Offers advice to teachers on how to conduct writing workshops, providing a rationale for writing workshops, looking at what they have in common across grade levels, and discussing the tone of workshop teaching, getting started with independent writing time, curriculum, focus lessons, assessment and evaluation, and other topics.

In clear language, Fletcher and Portalupi explain the simple principles that underlie the writing workshop and explore the major components that make it work.

This book explores the effectiveness of the workshop in the Creative Writing classroom, and looks beyond the question of whether or not the workshop works to address the issue of what an altered pedagogical model might look like. In visualising what else is possible in the workshop space, the sixteen chapters collected in ‘Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?’ cover a range of theoretical and pedagogical topics and explore the inner workings and conflicts of the workshop model. The needs of a growing and diverse student population are central to the chapter authors’ consideration of non-normative pedagogies. The book is a must-read for all teachers of Creative Writing, as well as for researchers in Creative Writing Studies.

Master the Elements of the Writing Workshop The great paradox of the writing life is that to be a good writer, you must be both interested in the world around you and comfortable working in solitude for hours on end. Fiction Writer's Workshop is designed to help you foster a strong sense of independence–of being and thinking on your own, of becoming self-evaluative without being self-critical–in order to accomplish what others seek in classroom groups. In this comprehensive guide, award-winning writer and teacher Josip Novakovich explores every aspect of the art of fiction and provides all the tools and techniques you'll need to develop day-to-day discipline as well as a personal writing style, such as: • More than 100 writing exercises, including dozens that are new to this edition, that challenge you to experiment with diverse writing styles • Specific statements of purpose for each exercise, to help guide you and instruct you at every step of the creative process • Self-critique questions to help you assess your work and identify strengths and weaknesses before moving on to the next lesson • The full text of eight acclaimed short stories, with analysis and exercises, to provide models for your own writing and help reinforce the lessons you've learned The practical, insightful methods offered in this workshop will clarify your voice, broaden your perspective, and strengthen your fiction."