This article takes up the "special strangeness" of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author's research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher…

What happens when international doctoral students participate in a creative writing workshop? Very often, students at our large midwestern U.S. university enter classes having learned English in their native countries with a heavy emphasis on only skills and grammar. They have not had the chance to play with language, to express themselves through…

In a creative writing workshop of seven male and nine female graduate students, two female students became increasingly aware of a sexual bias. Though the male instructor made an effort to create a non-hierarchical, student-centered environment, informal hierarchies developed among students that granted the male instructor and the male students…