Snapshot

Nancy K. Barry has lots of energy, and she needs it:  she has many roles at Luther College.  She is Professor of English, Assistant to the Dean for Writing and Academic Support, and College Writing Director.  A native of Baltimore, she earned her PhD in Twentieth-Century Poetry at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and teaches a range of writing at Luther and in the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival.  Her primary writing genre is creative nonfiction, but her most recent creative endeavor was writing a one-woman play about her experience as a teacher undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Lessons from Cancer College, which has been performed locally and around the Midwest by actress Kristen Underwood.  

Research Interests

As a writer, scholar, and teacher of literature and writing, I have found a good home at Luther College for my interests and enthusiasms. My doctoral dissertation on the American poet William Carlos Williams led me to respect those writers for whom writing involved a total immersion into language, including work in several genres. As a teacher, I am equally happy teaching our "Writer's Voice" class, "Contemporary Literature," "Writing for Media," or our advanced course in creative nonfiction, "The Essay." This emerging genre of nonfiction has been a long-standing interest of mine, and my own contributions to it have appeared in publications such as Iowa Woman, The Baltimore Sun, and most midwestern newspapers. For several years I contributed regular radio columns to the "Iowa Voices" series on WHO in Ames, and most recently have added my voice to a "collaborative" detective story, entitled Time and Chance: An Iowa Murder Mystery.

Thoughts About Teaching

As the Director of Writing in Paideia, I am committed to making the writing component of our common course a thorough, rigorous and helpful introduction to college-level writing. But good writers (like good readers) are never created in an intellectual vacuum. "Collaboration" and "community" are two words that form the backdrop for any class I teach, whether on Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace or the dangers of solipsism in writing autobiography. I am greatly indebted to Peter Elbow's work (best articulated in Writing Without Teachers), which taught me that readers are most helpful to apprentice writers when they cease making assumptions, corrections and quick judgments, and simply describe, with patient, careful attention, the "movie of their mind" as they read the words on the page. Most of my classes bear this imprint of a "workshop" or dialogue, and when the conversations are honest and thoughtful, they are the best medicine I know for a strong heart and an open mind. In addition to my teaching at Luther, my work as a facilitator of writing workshops at the University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival have led me to trust the process of writing and reading in ways both simple and profound. Wallace Stevens once said: "The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world." I agree, but would only remind that great poet that words are no less physical than our bones, and without either, we would have nothing to shape us.  View Nancy Barry's spotlight video on teaching and learning.

Writing Sample

Here's the opening paragraph from one of my essays, entitled "When the Cities Run Out," published in Trapeze, a regional literary magazine, in 1998:

“They say that home is where the heart is, but if that's true—how could it be such a great cliché if it weren't—then our hearts are where we lose home too. How do I know this? Because I've learned that geography is less a matter of space, time, climate or terrain than it is an internal response, and our bodies are the real navigators, moving us through a series of roads more aptly named after the places where our hearts gave up, gave in, gave back. To find my home, I would tell anyone who asked, travel 800 miles west on Youngest Child Interstate, and then head north for ten more years on county roads marked Worry and Regret. If you get lost-as I did, for half my life—you'll just need to keep moving, until you reach Iowa.”