“Many of us roam the dark corners of our minds, letting cheap booze and drugs rule. But this demon will not beat me. I’m too damn cool and too damn bad to let it. I will rise again.” Isiah-Henry Wilson

These aren’t the words you’d expect to see compiled by a college student. But for Northland College senior Alex Johnson, editing a book containing poems, drawings, photographs and stories by homeless people in Alaska, stories and poems similar to Wilson’s, became all too familiar this past summer.

Johnson spent his summer vacation interning at Bean’s Café in Anchorage. Bean’s Café is a day shelter dedicated to providing homeless people a warm meal and a place to go. Each day, Johnson would eat lunch at the Café with several hundred homeless people. And as he got to know these people, he began asking them to share their stories with him for a book titled: “Where Light Lives: Voices Without Walls.”

“When I first started doing the project, people would ask me how I thought I was helping them,” Johnson explained. “I just did my best to tell these people that I saw them as people with stories worth telling. I wanted them to know that their stories were important.”

His technique worked. Over the course of the summer, Johnson compiled the stories of more than 20 homeless people in Anchorage. The book, which is now in print, sells for $10 in local and major bookstores in Anchorage.

Johnson hopes the book stimulates discussion. “It is easy to not think about homelessness. But in order for social change to happen you have to get people to think and acknowledge it exists,” he said.

Johnson says his experiences at Northland College helped prepare him for this unique opportunity. “People need to realize that social issues are environmental issues and that environmental issues are social issues,” he said. “The two are definitely inter-connected.”

He went on to explain that so much of the conflict we see in society is a direct result of environmental issues and that many environmental issues are a result of the impact of society.

The practical skills he picked up along the way will go a long way in his future. “In just two-and-a-half months I learned the process of self-publishing, editing and collecting stories for a book,” he said. “There are not too many other opportunities for undergraduate students to get such direct experience.”

He plans to use this experience to return to Alaska later this year to pursue environmental work, something his major in writing and minor in Biology supports. As for how this experience changed his life, he feels he is walking away with a better understanding of people. “This project was really about relational empathy,” he said. “Learning how you can take your differences with other people and learn from it. I will never understand what it is like to be homeless. But I do now acknowledge who these people are and find value in their stories. That is where real change begins.”