Much of my professional work focuses on the history as well as study and teaching of college composition in the US and the problematics of composition's institutional location, using as my point of departure the question of work in composition – its constitution, status, conditions and effects. Applying that same point of departure to creative writing, in this chapter, I will approach creative writing in America (hereafter, CWIA) as a material social practice that manifests as an institutional phenomenon of postsecondary institutions, albeit one with inevitable ties to other cultural institutions, such as presses, bookstores, awards and review journals (cf. Pope, 2005: 40). More specifically, I argue that the work of CWIA is located in those practices, by students and teachers together, rather than strictly in the textual products of the faculty or in the publications of programs' alumnae: that is, I locate CWIA in the concrete labor conducted at that institutional site, not with commodifications of that labor taking the form of publications and careers, while recognizing that typically the work of creative writing is identified precisely with such commodifications and not with those practices, which are seen as mere precursors to those commodifications. In other words, from the perspective I'm advancing, the actual work that is CWIA goes largely unrecognized, as its work is occluded through and by its commodification. It follows that the kind of change that I'll argue CWIA might undertake is not a change through expansion of its charge through a broadening of the range of materials in which its commodities take form or in the nature of those commodities as, say, an abstracted entity dubbed 'creativity'. Instead, I'll argue for a change to CWIA in how it understands the work of CWIA.

More specifically still, I argue that we need to recognize the writing undertaken in creative writing programs by students and teachers not as precursive to actual creative writing but as itself work on and with language and language differences in writing.