Last year I became a student writer again-and a novice at that. For although I'd been teaching and writing nonfiction for years-both academic articles and feature stories-I never wrote much fiction. And although I dabbled in poetry, even had a few poems published once, I never before took a course in poetry writing. Frankly, I didn't have the guts in college, never thought of myself as creative enough to risk such public exposure. The budding confidence I felt in fourth grade when my suspense thriller, Thunderstorm, was published in a class booklet had been buried under too many years of exposition, both for school and work. I didn't really recover it until long after graduation, when I received a fellowship that gave me released time from full-time teaching in order to take two creative writing courses at Princeton University: one in fiction writing with Russell Banks, author of the much-acclaimed Continental Drift; the other in poetry writing, with Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. These were undergraduate courses incidently, because that's all Princeton offers, so except for three other older women (i.e., over 40) in the poetry class, the rest of my peers were under 22. It was a remarkable experience-to wear the shoe on the other foot and be a student again. For one thing, I realized how much more I enjoy learning now than I did at 20 when my future loomed before me like a huge, unmarked field. And how much more focused I am in energy once scattered on a million other concerns. For another thing, I've toughened up over the years. Twenty-five additional years of living and writing have helped me know and risk more, personally and intellectually, than I would ever have dared, even ten years ago. I have more of life to draw upon and more laurels to rest upon, as needed. These assets, I've found, are shared by other over-30 adults--even if, like many of my returning students, their extra writing experiences are mainly in letter or report writing. Life experience and writing success notwithstanding, I was surprised at my own vulnerabilities as a writer. Many of my fears, confusions, and needs were not as different from my younger counterparts' as I would have predicted. Remembering what it