A dozen years ago, Kathleen Flenniken was an engineer turned stay-at-home-mom who took a night class in poetry to occupy her thoughts while she was home with her children.

“I just caught fire,” Flenniken said. “I didn’t have time to sit down and write a novel, or even short stories. But I could write poems.”

These days, the 46-year-old Seattle woman is a poet whose first book was just nationally recognized by librarians and she’s part of a growing trend in college creative writing programs.

She’s a student who rarely gets to campus.

In August, she and 18 other poets and fiction and nonfiction writers will be the first graduating class with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

It’s what’s called a “low-residency program,” in which students gather at the Parkland university a short period each year, but do most of their work from home with the help of a mentor.

“The low-residency model is well-established,” program director Stan Rubin said. “It began decades ago in the East.”

He said the type of program is becoming more popular, in part because it offers established writers the chance to focus intensely on their craft. It was his dream – and that of his wife, writer Judith Kitchen – to have a program like it in the Northwest.

It’s a process-oriented workshop that helps writers get better, and happens to give them a marketable degree at the end, Rubin said.

“For people who are out of school a few years or many years, what they want at this point is serious, high-level attention to their development as a writer,” Rubin said. “We treat them in a way that’s appropriate to their age and life status. We don’t look to tell people how to become a writer.”

Instead, Rubin said, the program allows people to take their work and make it better.

“Our goal is literary achievement,” he said.

PLU’s program has about 70 students from more than 20 states whose median age is early 40s, Rubin explained. Many of them have already published their work, and all of them have had interesting lives before coming to the program.

The writers come to campus for a nine- or 10-day session in the summer and begin working one-on-one with a successful poet or author.

“People think our program has changed their life, and we think we pick the right people,” he said.

Flenniken and fellow student Kelli Russell Agodon both recently received national honors.

The American Library Association named Flenniken’s first book, “Famous,” as one of three “notable books of the year” in poetry. The poems were published in 2006 by the University of Nebraska, after Flenniken won the Prairie Schooner Prize for poetry in 2005.

The poems, about finding significance in domestic life, have reached a rare status for poetry: They’ve sold out and are going into a second printing.

Flenniken, a mother of three children ages 11 to 18, writes about her son losing his coats, about sitting in an International House of Pancakes waiting to go to the hospital, about how her father organized her mother’s things after she died, about awakening from a dream to her baby crying.

One of Agodon’s poems has been honored by the Atlantic Monthly magazine. “How Killer Blue Irises Spread” placed first in the magazine’s national poetry-writing contest for student writers, and it will be published in a summer issue.

In her master’s degree work, Agodon is working with Alaskan poet Peggy Shumaker and writing a collection of poetry. She’s also working on a children’s book.

Flenniken said being in the PLU program has given her the opportunity to work with amazing poets and the freedom to put aside other responsibilities and read.

She is working with poet Sharon Bryan, and her project is a collection of poems about living near, and working as, an engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Rubin said Flenniken and Agodon are part of an exceptional class of students who helped start the master’s program in 2004 with great style.

He said Agodon is terrific with imagery and that her poetry has a lot of heart in it. He calls Flenniken’s poems deceptively complex in their subtlety and accessibility.

It’s “very easy to read and enjoy her poems, but they, at the same time, draw you in, in a very deep way,” Rubin said. “It’s the kind of poetry you feel like going back and reading again.”

A LOOK AT THE POETRY

Lost coat, Pls Call Even in Sporting Goods, even as my son

grinned at it in the three-way mirror,

that coat started disappearing,

slipping in and out of the material plane.

Even as I wrote his name

on the inside tag below Men’s Small,

as if that would fend off loss, it started

to look missing. We try to be optimists here,

we send him out each morning in a coat

and he comes back with it sometimes.

Even after a Samaritan came upon it in a field,

read the name and tracked him down,

he didn’t really own the coat, he’d only

borrowed it until he could return it

to the universe, the way at two he cast

his first hooded fleece from his stroller.

That one had drawstrings with wooden toggles

and I dreamed of it once, hanging

on a scarecrow. In my dreams I revisit

them all – the red Gore-Tex, the green slicker

with cargo pockets, the beige fleece

and the blue fleece and the rust jacket with

yellow sleeves. They hang on fence posts,

in magic closets extending into parallel worlds,

on air currents like sea gulls – coats soaring

on uplifts in the cold and rain as my son

lopes along below, in my arms one moment,

the next out the door, insufficiently warm.

- By Kathleen Flenniken

Read more online

Kathleen Flenniken: www.kathleenflenniken.com

Kelli Russell Agodon: www.agodon.com

PLU’s Master of Fine Arts creative writing workshop: www.plu.edu/~mfa