Alumni profile: Dana Stabenow, MFA '85

Acclaimed author Dana Stabenow is often quoted as saying, "I never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

Born in Anchorage in 1952, Stabenow grew up on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She lived her life listening to pilots, crab fishermen, Natives and state troopers. One of the things she learned while listening is that the stories always change in the telling.

Graduating from Seldovia High School in 1969, Stabenow put herself through college working as an egg grader, bookkeeper and expediter for Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods in Anchorage. After receiving a B.A. in journalism from the University of Alaska in 1973, Stabenow spent one more summer knee-deep in humpies and then blew everything she earned on a four-month backpacking trip to Europe. Then she went to work on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline until 1982. Deciding to try her luck as an author, Stabenow enrolled in the UAA MFA program, from which she graduated in 1985 and then, as she says, "sat down to write."

Stabenow's goal? Sell a book before she went broke. She just barely made it.

In an interview with Writers Write, Stabenow shared what it was like in the six years between graduation and getting her first book published. "When I left my job on the North Slope, my goal was to sell a book before I ran out of savings. I would never admit, at least out loud, to the possibility of any other outcome. Never give up; never surrender, no matter how many of my manuscripts came back from New York like little homing pigeons."

Stabenow's first book, a science fiction novel called Second Star, was published in 1991 but received little attention. Her editor asked what else she had laying around. That something else turned out to be a book imaginatively titled Mystery, which she'd written for fun and never tried to sell. Lo and behold, it turned out to be A Cold Day for Murder, the first of the Kate Shugak series. The book won an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 1993.

Twenty-seven books later, Stabenow herself is now a success story.

When asked how her education shaped her as a writer, Stabenow replied, "My journalism degree taught me how to research and how to write on deadline, both essential tools in the writer's toolbox.  My MFA made me look at style, technique and critical examination in literature.  More simply, my MFA made me a better editor of my own work, another indispensable tool."

Stabenow continues to tell her own stories about Alaska. Often the seed of the story comes from a factual incident, but then the story evolves into something completely different. And in every one of Stabenow's Alaska novels there are always one or two references that only Alaskans will understand.