Singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright Anaïs Mitchell ’04 recounts her unexpected journey at Middlebury College, which she initially resisted attending due to its proximity to her home and her countercultural dreams. Despite this, she formed a profound bond with political science professor Jeff Cason, who nurtured her creative spirit. With Cason’s encouragement, she followed her passion for music, creating her first album—an experience that shaped her career and life’s path and led to the development of the Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown.

In June 2024 Anaïs shared her story as part of a “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event.

Listen to Mitchell’s talk above or read the transcript below.

Transcript

I didn’t exactly want to come to Middlebury College. I grew up 10 minutes from here and my dad taught here, so there was a big discount for me to come. I considered myself counterculture and thought it was too preppy for me.

I was an aspiring singer-songwriter and thought maybe I shouldn’t get a college degree at all because it seemed mundane and didn’t track with my grand and bohemian plan for my life. But I didn’t want to break my parents’ hearts. So I made a deal with them that I would come to Middlebury if I could take a gap year first and work on my songs, which I did.

The year went by, and it was time to come to school. I came ready to do battle with preppy culture. I shaved my whole head the summer before school started. During my first semester, I took a job nude modeling in an extracurricular drawing class, which is how I met my college boyfriend, Noah. He was drawing me and, in the middle of his drawing, he took off his own shirt. I was like, wow, I’m kind of into that. He was also into me, but he was pretty sure I was a lesbian because of my haircut.

The first semester I was here, I randomly took an intro to political science class with professor Jeff Cason. I liked him right away. I remember that I tested him. He would assign these papers, and I would always try to come at them from some creative angle. The first paper I wrote for him was entitled, “Only Mama Gets to Spank.” It had something to do with Max Weber, but I don’t remember what. I was testing him because I wanted to know if creativity could be welcome in political science and academia. His response was always yes.

Even though it didn’t make the most sense for a bohemian singer-songwriter to major in political science, that’s what I did. I chose Jeff Cason as my advisor.

The fall of my sophomore year, I was on my way to breakfast at Proctor. I noticed Proctor Lounge was jammed full of students all gathered around a little television that used to be in the corner of the lounge. I got there right in time to see one of the towers fall in New York. Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. I went to find Noah at the mill where he was a member.

What I remember is that on the night of September 11th, we slept on the roof of the mill. We pulled a futon mattress out onto the roof and slept under the stars. There was somebody playing a saxophone in the street below us in the dark. It was as if I had never heard music before—it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. Noah turned to me and said, “Do you want to have a baby?” And I said, “Yeah.” Without even thinking about it, it was an intuitive response to a tragedy of that scale. We had never seen anything like that, and the question was, what’s coming next? It was one of the first experiences I had of feeling like life might be short.

That same fall, I was in another Jeff Cason class. It was a Spanish-language political science class. I remember him addressing the class after 9/11. He put himself in our shoes. He said that he had lived maybe half his life, but that we had only lived a fraction of ours. It was a very beautiful thing to hear from a political science teacher who could have had all kinds of analyses or advice. He just put himself in our shoes, and that is how he was.

I didn’t have a baby that year, but I did leave school again for a while. I moved in with Noah. We moved to Austin, Texas, because we were in love, life was short, and I wanted to be writing songs, not papers. I thought maybe I would never come back, but seven or eight months went by, and then it started to feel like maybe life was actually going to be long. In this scenario where life was long, maybe it was a good idea to finish my degree, even if it wasn’t sexy, just to see it through. There’s value in seeing it through.

So I came back to school, and in my senior year, I had a choice to make. I could either do a thesis for the political science department or I could make an album. I remember talking to Jeff Cason about this in his office, and, like always, he encouraged me to follow my muse, which I did. I made an album called Hymns for the Exile. It was my first record, and it kind of launched my life in music. It was a very political album, and I remember that in the liner notes, I included little footnotes, like an annotated bibliography, as if it was a thesis.

And this album couldn’t have existed without life being short and long. It wouldn’t have existed without the saxophone in the dark and without dropping out of school to be with this man I was in love with. It also wouldn’t have existed without the four years of academic work with Jeff Cason as my advisor.

Twelve years after the night on the roof, Noah and I had our first baby. Noah’s here next. Seven years after that, we had another one. When the little one was just an infant, I was invited to speak to the graduating class here at Middlebury. The best thing about it was that I reconnected with Jeff Cason.

I got comfortable calling him Jeff, which I had never been able to do before. He was the provost at that time, and he had a ceremonial hat with ribbons. He helped me pin about a hundred bobby pins to my own hat so it wouldn’t fall off during my speech. He really held my hand through the event. He was funny, smart, humane—everything I remembered.

I’m so glad I got that time with him because he died a year after that, unexpectedly. When he said to us in that Spanish language class that he had maybe lived half his life, he was actually at his two-thirds mark. But he couldn’t have known it.

There was another assignment I did for that class—a creative spin on an assignment. I learned this Spanish language folk song from Argentina, “Gracia Avida” (“Thanks to Life”). I learned all the verses of this song in Spanish and performed them in class. It’s a beautiful song with many verses, and it’s really a list of imagery from life. A lot of it is very big and grand—cities, mountains, and stars.

At the end of each verse, it becomes small and mundane, but full of meaning because she talks about the man she loves. She talks about his voice, his eyes, his street, and his patio. I sang this song when I was 20 years old, not knowing much about what it was about. Maybe a little bit. My teacher, who was probably the age I am now, likely knew a bit more about it.

But neither of us knew on that day if life was short or if life was long, because it’s always both.

Thank you.