Graduate students in the ASU Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing have worked at the Scottsdale Village Square Vistas Unit since the fall of 1992. Teams of two or three poets and fiction writers conduct semester-long workshops with residents who write or speak their poems and stories.

Each semester, MFA candidates devise new curricula and invent creative projects involving the writer-residents of Vistas. In 1993, the students won first place in the Rousseau Awards competition sponsored by the ASU Adult Development and Aging Program. They won for Stories We Tell Ourselves, an anthology of written and oral poetry.

Alice, a woman who no longer spoke aloud, wrote this poem:

Cloves

A little girl thin year
with some grass amid the house
and dark vegetables getting
further away in the year
for a green thought.

In the spare time,
in the house next
to the spruce and the wheat.
In the urgent house,
the house of cleaning,
the house in the trees
in the time of the heart
amid the fish.

In that place is
a good trip
on this paper.

When the next semester’s project started, Alice was no longer in the writing group. She had died. The students were glad to have her good trip on that paper.

The next team members wrote in the introduction to their anthology, “As we dealt with the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, we came to appreciate the freeing aspects of memory loss on the creative process. Very soon we were able to embrace an insight Butch offered on the very first day we met: ‘Does it really matter if it’s true?’”—Karla Ellison

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