The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1 1912 drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term workshop for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term now ubiquitous was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today the MFA master of fine arts industry is a booming one with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model.In Craft Class Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies the workshop has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professionalmanagerial soft skillslinguistic facility social and emotional discernment symbolic fluencyin the language of manual labor the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or handloomed Pottery Barn ruga space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another just as rightwing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism.Delineating an arc that extends from Bostons fin de sicle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA Craft Class reveals how presentday creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor education and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture Kempf shows manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does tha