While professors are expected to write and publish and are paid to teach, many of us also build creative writing programs that extend beyond the curriculum to extracurricular programming such as reading series, literary journals and presses and community outreach. ‘The Program Beyond the Program’ is a case study of sorts in which four faculty at Chapman University – a fiction writer, a poet, a composition-rhetoric faculty and a librarian and digital humanist – work independently and together to build programming. The program beyond the program matches expectations of the Hallmarks suggested by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, fits the institutional opportunities and constraints, and pushes students beyond what they already know and can do. This chapter also explores commonsense concepts that challenge institutional territorialism: when individuals share ideas, each individual starts only with his or her own ideas but comes away with a whole host of ideas.

Jim Blaylock: I currently direct the MFA program at Chapman University and have directed both the BFA and the MFA programs here for the past 12 years. I only recently secured course reallocation to support this position. Over the past several years, the full-time creative writing faculty has grown from three members (two tenured, one not) to seven members, all tenured. We’ve added a creative nonfiction element to the program and a poetry program with a dedicated poetry journal and reading series. We’ve also joined the larger community of university writing programs by becoming active members of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and making changes in the program that are in line with AWP Hallmarks. In fact, we’ve cited AWP Hallmarks when negotiating teaching loads and course reallocation. We've also added extracurricular activities: readings, guest authors and other events.