The Writing Workshop as an Institution

Granting graduate credit for fiction and poetry in 1936, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop challenged a university system built on philology, criticism, and the belief that “genius” could not be taught. By treating original stories and poems as legitimate thesis work, Iowa forced scholars to confront questions of academic rigor, grading, and the long-standing doctrine that creative writing belonged outside the classroom. The program’s compromise that writing itself may resist instruction while writers can be trained helped usher in what critics now call the “program era,” reshaping how American literature is made and where emerging authors learn their craft.

In contemporary publishing, the idea of a graduate degree in creative writing is taken as a given. Agents, editors, and prize lists are crowded with graduates of structured workshops, and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era argues that postwar American fiction can only be understood in light of those programs. The system has a clear origin. When the University of Iowa formally established the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936, it became the first creative writing degree program in the United States and the model for much of what followed. Granting graduate credit for the writing of fiction and poetry themselves, rather than for critical work on existing literature, signaled that original creative work could sit at the center of a curriculum, be evaluated by faculty, and qualify a student for an advanced degree.

The roots of that shift stretch back to 1922. Under the Graduate College dean Carl Seashore, Iowa became the first public university in the United States to accept creative work as a substitute for traditional theses in the fine and performing arts, allowing students to submit collections of poems, musical compositions, or visual work in place of research dissertations. The Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936 under Wilbur Schramm as a formal graduate program in fiction and poetry, turned that earlier policy into a durable institutional structure and became the earliest sustained program to grant an advanced creative degree in those disciplines. What appeared on paper to be an administrative adjustment amounted to a redefinition of what was considered legitimate graduate work and provided the template for hundreds of later MFA programs.

At the time, English departments in the United States were organized around philology, literary history, and criticism, the close study of language and canonical texts rather than the production of new work. Graduate students proved their mastery by tracing sources, editing manuscripts, reconstructing historical contexts, and writing monographs on established authors. Creative work by living writers did not fit that model. Elevating original stories and poems to the level of a thesis blurred the line between academic research and artistic practice, threatening a hierarchy in which the proper business of the university was not to create literature, but to interpret it.

Behind that resistance lay an older intellectual habit: the idea of artistic “genius” as something essentially unteachable. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment described genius as a natural talent that “cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products” and that “gives the rule” to art rather than following a rule that can be explained and passed on. Artistic creation, in this view, is precisely what escapes method. You can train skill, but the originating impulse that makes a work genuinely new cannot be taught. Filtered through Romanticism and nineteenth-century aesthetics, that conception shaped how many scholars and writers thought about literature well into the twentieth century.

When universities began to entertain the idea of creative writing courses, that assumption hardened into a slogan: “writing cannot be taught.” Histories of creative-writing pedagogy note that skepticism about instruction has accompanied the field’s growth, with critics arguing that programs either produce homogenous “assembly-line” work or take credit for what is, in fact, innate talent. For professors trained in philology or criticism, the thought of awarding a master’s degree for a sheaf of poems could look like a category error, a misapplication of the degree structure to something that, by definition, exceeded formal instruction.

Even supporters of creative writing repeated versions of the same doubt. Iowa’s own public statements have long walked this line. The Workshop’s philosophy page affirms that “though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed,” explicitly likening the study of writing to learning the violin or painting, a discipline in which structured training can refine ability but cannot guarantee excellence. Later profiles of the Workshop quote administrators reiterating that the success of its alumni is “more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” even as the program functions as an intensive training ground. That stance is a deliberate compromise: denying that genius is manufactured in a classroom while insisting that certain habits of craft and reading can be.

There were also practical objections. Once a university grants credit for creative work, it must address uncomfortable questions about evaluation. What constitutes a “passing” collection of short stories? On what basis does a committee fail a volume of poems? How are originality, voice, and narrative power to be graded and justified within an institution that prides itself on transparent evaluation standards? Early commentary on creative writing as a discipline returns to these worries: the fear that assessment will collapse into taste, that degrees will be awarded for charm or promise rather than demonstrable knowledge, and that the presence of creative theses will dilute the perceived rigor of graduate study.

Iowa’s answer was to frame the Workshop as a place where writing would be treated with the same technical seriousness as any established graduate discipline in the humanities, without pretending that inspiration itself could be manufactured. Histories of the program emphasize Wilbur Schramm’s conviction that writing should be “as technical and rigorous a pursuit as any traditional literature degree,” and that the workshop format existed to make that rigor visible. Students were required to produce new work on a schedule, circulate it in advance, and sit while faculty and peers examined their writing line by line around a table. The model created accountability in several directions at once: deadlines that could not be postponed without consequence, public scrutiny rather than private drafting, and revisions that had to respond to concrete criticism rather than to mood. A student who arrived with weak or unfinished pages could not hide. The underlying assumption was not that a program could mint genius in two years, but that writers with real potential would improve under sustained pressure, close reading, and repeated cycles of critique and revision in a cohort that took their work as seriously as any seminar paper.

Against that backdrop, the founding of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936 was radical in three interlocking ways. It collapsed the long-standing separation between the study of literary history and the act of adding to it, treating original creative work as a proper object of graduate education rather than as an extracurricular activity. It revised the Romantic doctrine of genius, conceding that there are aspects of art that resist instruction while insisting that craft, structure, and reading practices can be taught, practiced, and strengthened. And it brought questions of technique, audience, and aesthetic judgment into the formal space of the university, where they would be debated in classrooms and among literary committees, rather than in private circles.

In the decades since, creative writing programs have multiplied to the point that critics now describe a “program era” in American fiction, with the workshop model functioning as one of the leading institutions through which literary careers are formed. Graduate writing programs appear as a matter of routine in prize biographies, faculty job descriptions, and publisher catalogs. Debates about whether writing can be taught still surface whenever MFAs are discussed, but those debates now assume that the workshop exists, occupies institutional space, and will continue to do so. That assumption is part of Iowa’s legacy. In 1936, granting a graduate degree for a book of poems or stories required a deliberate act of imagination by a university that had previously reserved its highest credentials for scholarship. The decision recast creative practice as work that merited credit, sustained critique, and institutional time rather than as something that had to live entirely at the margins of “real” academic labor.