Garrett, George. "The Future of Creative Writing Programs." Creative Writing in America.

This chapter mostly speaks as to the possible history of creative writing throughout American history. I've noted some of the more interesting information below, which might be useful later on to show how creative writing and composition are more entertwined than we allow to acknowledge in academia, and why "creative" writers might feel displaced in academia now.

Garrett states that there is misinformation "masquerading as assumed history, as the story of creative writing in America" (47). He speaks of a talk giving by novelist and poet John Williams at the first-ever meeting of the Associated Writing Programs, who read from a sixteenth-century teachers' handbook. The standard "classical composition" education had Latin poetry and prose as one of its key elements, which continued as the classics were the "heart and guts of education" (48). So bringing these elements into the teaching of writing did not begin with creative writing programs; creative writing programs are reviving or renewing the practice. He also points to several composition courses taught in Princeton in the 1940s and 1950s that required students to write poems or stories as part of the curriculum.

Garrett states that no one actually studied modern or contemporary literature in American colleges and universities until after World War II. Strikes happened in colleges so post-war soldiers could read the work of their contemporaries (49). Much more is made in this chapter of the history of literature, and of "Old Guard" movements to categorize work into canons.

What I found most interesting in this chapter is that Garrett mentions that most working writers did not make appearances into academia until the late 1950s; academia, in other words, was not considered a vocation for writers, with the exception of a few notable exceptions such as Robert Frost. Rather, writers such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald wrote for the movies for a living, and as employees, not as writers-in-residence (52). "Faulkner was an old man and already had the Nobel Prize when the University of Virginia discovered he was already living in town, anyway, and found an inexpensive place for him on the staff."

So those who studied and taught writing, and those who practiced it for a living, might have been considered very different entities on college campuses, which could be why they are considered disparate programs now. Even now there seems to be a push to teach "academic" writing in composition classes, rather than writing as a way of life or as a vocation.