Anchorage Daily News

Tomorrow it will be two weeks since I put a duffel bag in my Subaru and grabbed a stack of CDs so I'd have Sheryl Crow and Merle Haggard for company as I drove for two days from Haines to Anchorage to attend college for the first time in 27 years.

I am earning an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from the new low-residency CWLA program (Creative Writing and Literary Arts) at UAA.

You have to learn a lot of letters to be a writer.

Why would someone go back to college when, as one of the poets lecturing us so helpfully put it, life is already half over? I may have less time than that. If I live as long as my mother did, I've got 22 years. Who would voluntarily give up one minute of it to stand in a cafeteria, with dinner cooling on the tray, scanning the tables to see which one has room for you?

My classmates include a farmer from Maine, a teacher from Fairbanks, a Mexican-American girl from Anchorage, a journalist from Hawaii, an ex-cop from Sitka, at least two lawyers, a young woman who lived through Hurricane Katrina and an even younger girl with yards of dreadlocks who finds God in the mountains, although her mother is a fundamentalist minister. There's also a young fisherwoman from Kodiak and a boy from North Carolina who makes me laugh.

But tonight I'm alone in my dorm room, squinting at my laptop because I broke my glasses, writing a paper about why I want to be a writer and what I hope to get out of the next three years of this school whose classes will be mostly at home, online.

It is after midnight and raining again, and I can hear the flow of the river of cars on the highways beyond the trees. An ambulance on its way to nearby Providence hospital. I think a few good thoughts for whoever is in it and whoever loves them.

I am learning to pay more attention. Eva Saulitis, the nature writer and teacher from Homer, said we should look at something we've never seen before every single day. She said we need to "have the courage to see."

Another lecturer, Oscar Kawagley, a Yupiaq elder, supposedly explained how to build a traditional sod house but really shared the story of his life and the values of his tribe. "Listen to your mind and heart," he instructed us. That way, you'll know if you are "living a life that feels just right."

It feels all right to be hanging around with these writers and teachers, from the contractor-turned-prof who insists that we tell a good story and not just write flowery words about nothing, to the poet from Fairbanks who read his very sexy poems about global warming, out loud, in a full theater, prompting the former to quip of the latter, "If this is what climate does in the Interior, imagine what is going on up in Barrow."

I have listened as writers argued about the value of the message versus the value of the music in a sentence, then agree that good writing is both.

I heard a teacher from Juneau, my new friend Ernestine Hayes, share that type of writing, chanting a tale of a drunken man drowning that was so hard and so beautiful that when it was over I took a slow walk.

One teacher-poet from San Francisco played a show tune to help us hear the rhyme of an ancient Persian style of verse, the kind they write and sing in Iraq. A feisty retired professor read a poem about her father abusing her that bruised my heart. A nonfiction writer took us on a lovely visit to her family home in rural Scotland, a stone farmhouse with collies sleeping by the stove and cat food spilled in the hall.

I am a little homesick, too, and glad that I'll be at the family dinner table again this weekend. My husband half-worried that I'd take up with a schmoozy, wine-drinking, smoke-ring-blowing poet, but I haven't met anyone like that, and we all drank way more coffee than wine.

But now I have homework to do, and I'm feeling a bit like the scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz" as I write a plan about how I'm going to earn that degree that says I'm a writer and why I want to. It's late and I'm tired and this is so personal. I type my desire to write a novel and can't believe my nerve.

I don't share that I feel like I'm singing a duet with Merle Haggard, "throwing horseshoes over my left shoulder" and searching for that four-leaf clover, or that I'm back in college at 49 because I want to write words that dance and learn that it is not a waste of time to lie on my back and watch the clouds or spend a whole day writing a story that makes you smile, or cry, or inhale, or maybe even get really angry, because I'm still young enough to believe that words can change the world, but I'm old enough to know that the question isn't "why" -- it's "why not?"

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.

ADVERTISEMENT