Response to Doug Hesse's "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies"

Many thanks to Doug Hesse for “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” ( CCC 62.1), in which he makes a case for close ties and fruitful conversation between creative writing and composition studies. I appreciate his history of relations between creative writing and composition; his succinct summary of our differing notions of writing, teaching, and research; and his hope for détente between the two fields. I’d like to explore in a bit more depth the value Hesse finds in creative writing’s foundational beliefs about texts and their production, and I’d also like to discuss gifts that composition might offer creative writing, our close and competitive sibling, in return.