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For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Composition and Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields' common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, for students, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circulation of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composing texts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars.
In recent springs I've attended two professional conferences that view writing through lenses so different it's hard to perceive a common object at their focal points. The sessions at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) consist overwhelmingly of talks on craft and technique and readings by authors, with occasional panels on teaching or on matters of administration, genre, and the status of creative writing in the academy or publishing. The sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) reverse this ratio, foregrounding teaching, curricular, and administrative concerns, featuring historical, interpretive, and empirical research, every spectral band from qualitative to quantitative. CCCC sponsors relatively few presentations on craft or technique, in the sense of telling session goers "how to write." Readings by authors as performers, in the AWP sense, are scant to absent.
The distinctions between these meetings and their sponsoring organizations are tellingly metonymic of contrasts between academic creative writing and composition studies. CCCC features writing teachers who are also scholars of rhetoric, writing, and communication; AWP features writers who are often teachers and, very occasionally, scholars of writing. CCCC has maintained more or less a membership steady state with a fairly narrow target membership of people who hold teaching positions; AWP has been relatively entrepreneurial, seeking not only writers in the academy but writers beyond. Over the decades, the exhibits at CCCC have dwindled with every publisher consolidation to a couple dozen booths; in 2009 the exhibits at AWP occupied three large halls in the Chicago Hilton with hundreds of presses and journals. In 2010 the exhibit space at Denver's Colorado Convention Center was even vaster.
Professional creative writing's own critics have suggested over the years that academic creative writing has become what D....