Journey of the mind

On the first night of class, Judy Fuwell said a silent prayer that she was doing the right thing. Because, really, who did she think she was, signing up for an eight-month course in the humanities? The humanities! What good would that do? Her husband was so angry, he wasn't speaking to her. "You can't go to school," he said. "Who's going to be home? Who's going to cook dinner?"

At 52, Fuwell has spent most of her life taking care of other people: four children, one of them autistic, and now a father-in-law with Alzheimer's and a grandson whose mother was a meth addict. A few years ago, Fuwell was diagnosed with breast cancer, and before that her husband had been laid off from his factory job. Without health insurance, the family had struggled, and even now their lives were often about just getting through each day. Now she wanted to study philosophy and art history?

She had 19 classmates that first night, including a woman who had spent four years in prison, a single mother who was once homeless and a Baha'i refugee from Iran. They had all signed on for the first-ever Venture Course in the Humanities, a program of the Utah Humanities Council. Funded by two foundations, it offered free books, tuition, child care, bus passes, college professors and eight hours of college credit. The only requirements were that the students be low-income, be able to read newspaper-level English and have a hunger to learn.

On the first night of class, 20 people were nervous, but perhaps only Fuwell said a prayer. Before the night was over, she had her answer in a poem called "The Journey" by Mary Oliver. The teacher, University of Utah English professor Jeff Metcalf, read it out loud:

One day you finally knew/what you had to do, and began/though the voices around you/ kept shouting their bad advice — /though the whole house/began to tremble/and you felt the old tug at your ankles./"Mend my life!"/each voice cried./But you didn't stop/You knew what you had to do.

And then the ending: determined to do/the only thing you could do—/determined to save/ the only life that you could save.

Judy Fuwell heard those words and wept.

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A decade ago, New York author and poverty activist Earl Shorris dreamed up the idea that led to Venture and 14 similar courses across the United States. Shorris, in turn, got the idea from a conversation he had at a maximum-security prison, with a prisoner named Viniece Walker.