Flutterby™! : Writer's Workshops and the MFA are a CIA plot

Culture Shock: Reassessing the Workshop

Ironically, the workshop’s roots are overtly political. It was by reading two books—Anis Shivani’s Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies and Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War—that I learned about how the U.S. government, via the CIA, interfered in the creation of the Iowa Workshop, and how this interference continues to inform the multitude of writing programs we have today. From 1941 to 1964, Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Paul Engle fundraised for the program by using explicitly anticommunist rhetoric, promising to promote American values through the teaching of creative writing. Among the program’s donors were the Rockefeller Foundation, State Department, the Fairfield Foundation, and the Asia Foundation, the latter two of which were CIA front groups.

(Interesting follow-on to noting that modern art was a CIA weapon)