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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — At Anchorage’s downtown market on a gray afternoon, Sandy Kleven takes the stage in spangles and scarves. She belly dances like a free-spirited Gypsy.

Maybe a couple dozen people are standing or sitting around picnic tables, watching as they eat stuffed potatoes and sip lattes. It’s Kleven’s show. She sewed the costumes, recruited her young granddaughter and other dancers to join her.

Kleven, 63, is a woman with a lot going on, inside and out. Her job is intense. A clinical social worker, she has swooped into villages after suicides, trying to prevent more deaths. She has counseled young children hospitalized for bizarre or scary behaviors, treated alcoholics misdiagnosed for years as schizophrenics.

After decades in the field, Kleven is trying to leave tragedy behind and remake herself as an artist. She works at being a poet, playwright, painter, jewelry maker and marketer, but she’s unsure how to make a living with any of it.

She dances, but that’s just for fun. She recently discovered a name for what she hopes to become: “creative freelancer.”

A life of gut-wrenching crisis work has shaped and damaged her. It’s made her more real, more down-to-earth as a counselor, she says, which can be useful in her work. In her art, it’s indispensable.

This past summer, her brother hanged himself in the trailer he shared with his stepson and nephew, the oldest of Kleven’s four boys.

Everything that built up in her over the years, all the pain caught from other people’s traumas, exploded.

Suddenly she was the wounded one.

Kleven found ways to put art into her life and work almost from the beginning.

Years ago, she produced plays about child abuse prevention. By 2004, she was writing poetry constantly. The next year she started a graduate program in creative writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. At 60, she says, it was “now or never.”

For a while in 2005, Kleven set up a stand on First Fridays in Ship Creek Center. “Poems $1,” her sign said.

In 2006, she surprised herself by selling several abstract works created from torn paper — collages made from children’s art. She put on a six-week workshop that promised “three life changing visionary experiences” and more for $85.

“She had us doing everything from left-handed portraits of ourselves to ... spontaneous dramatic scenes,” said Erin Wilcox, a writer who attended the workshop and now is Kleven’s editor.

“The way I think of it, any strong trait has a shadow. For all the light that Sandy brings into a room, she’s been through a lot of dark times,” Wilcox said.

As a child growing up near Seattle, Kleven saw social work from the receiving end. Her mother got pregnant at 15, married the father, had Sandy at 16. Her father was a carpenter and fundamentalist Christian who played bass fiddle. Her mother was a Lutheran who took care of welfare babies waiting for adoption.

“Some of my brothers and sisters and me got saved every Sunday,” Kleven says.

When she was in the fifth grade, her parents split up. She moved with her mom and the kids to Kenmore, north of Seattle. The family went on welfare, got a gift box at Christmas. The kids ate free lunches at school. The charity humiliated Sandy.

Her mother worked nights at a tavern. The six children knew not to pick up the phone unless they heard their mother’s code — two rings, a hang up, a call back. Otherwise it might be someone who couldn’t know that Mom was working.

Sandy had to take care of the younger kids. She was mad about it, mad about being poor. She said mean things. Her mother objected with slaps and broomstick swipes.

“There were a lot of rough times but an awful lot of good times, too,” said her mother, Betty Gardiner, now 80.

In high school, Kleven hung out on the fringes of the older cooler kids, the ones into art and theater and ’60s social change.

Then “I followed the family tradition. I got pregnant as a high school senior,” Kleven said. The school kicked her out.

She got her high school diploma at a technical school. She moved to New York City with baby Michael and a boyfriend and became a “hipster arty person,” modeling nude for drawing classes. The relationship didn’t last.

Kleven ended up back in the same community near Seattle where she went to high school, no sign yet of her social work vocation — a go-go dancer at a tavern. One night, her secret sixth-grade crush, Richard Kleven, showed up. The next night, he gave her a ride home.

“After that, in a sense he never let me out of his sight,” Kleven said.

They’ve been married 41 years.

In 1984, she landed a job as an alcohol abuse counselor in Bethel and moved to Alaska with Richard and their three younger boys.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be postcard Alaska. I knew about the mud. I knew something about the problems,” Kleven said. But the problems of poverty and alcohol and abuse were deeper and darker than she had ever imagined.

After three years, she left, got a master’s degree Outside, then spent a long stretch in Valdez, immersed in other people’s worries.

From the safety of Valdez, she wrote “Holy Land,” a haunting monologue about Bethel. It’s in the voice of a Yup’ik man who can look into the mind and heart of someone like her.

Kleven was afraid people in Bethel might be upset with her. But the reaction was good.

“It’s great that somebody finally said this is how it is,” said Gladys Johnson, who is Yup’ik and was born in a sod house in Hooper Bay.

Kleven moved back to Anchorage in 2004 but kept working for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation. Until recently, she was flying across the state for weekend crisis duty. She still works in villages for the Tanana Chiefs Conference, helping Head Start teachers deal with kids’ behavioral and emotional issues.

This summer, a visiting poet at UAA read “Holy Land” and asked Kleven how she kept herself healthy through all the years of trauma.

“I said I don’t. I’m totally wrecked. Ruined. Totally. Gone.”

Now it’s time to harvest her past life and move with what she knows, take who she is now onto a new stage.

Kleven is working on a new children’s book and a memoir. She won a writing award this year for a story about her grandson, who is developmentally disabled.

“Boundaries are wider for an artist — I can be a bit wild ... daring, allow myself to be less ’proper,’ “ Kleven wrote. “As a social worker, my concern has been social justice, reform, families, improved systems of care ... these surface in my art and writing.”