Barbara Mahany
Author Interview - Barbara Mahany
Author of The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season
“Winter is the coldest time of the year. The days are shorter, and the nights are longer. Deciduous trees are bare of leaves, and some animals hibernate. Christmas is celebrated, one year comes to an end, and a new year begins.”
Author Interview - Barbara Mahany
Author I draw inspiration from: Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, E.B. White, Jane Kenyon, Elizabeth Alexander, Christian Wiman
Author Interview - Barbara Mahany
Favorite place to read a book: The window seat in my bedroom that looks into the boughs of a giant towering locust tree and a much more humble serviceberry. The robins and cardinals and sparrows pay me no mind, and it's as if I'm sidled on the bough beside them.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with: Wilbur and Charlotte and Fern from "Charlotte's Web." I'd love to listen in on their whispers. They have much to teach about tenderness, love, and loyalty.
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author: I was a longtime newspaper writer (Chicago Tribune) and when I started writing quiet essays from my own simple home life, I started to wonder if maybe they could make a leap to the longer-lasting binding of a book. Newspapers too often become tomorrow's fish wrap. Or in the case of my mother, bird-cage liner.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook: For now, hardback.
The last book I read: "Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World," by Linda Hogan. A brilliant collection of essays -- seen through the wisdoms of Hogan's Chickasaw lens -- exploring both natural and internal landscapes.
Author Interview - Barbara Mahany
Pen & paper or computer: Still can't believe it, but computer.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with: Fern, the defiant farm girl of who would not let the runt of the litter be put to the ax. I'm talking "Charlotte's Web," of course.
Author Interview - Barbara Mahany
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a: A writer who filled pages of notebooks that maybe no one would ever see. Or a pediatric nurse because that's what I used to be, and I love taking care of children, and listening for the worries that keep them awake at night.
Favorite decade in fashion history: The one that demands nothing more elaborate than old jeans and T shirt. And in winter, the coziest sweater I can pull over my head.
Place I’d most like to travel: Portland, Oregon, cuz my firstborn just moved there and I want to see and taste and inhale all his new favorite haunts.
My signature drink: Coffee, best sipped before the crack of dawn. And in solitude.
Favorite artist: Mary Cassatt's brilliant studies of women and children. And I happened to be reading just yesterday about the spirituality of Vincent Van Gogh, and how he sought to illuminate the divine spark in anyone and everything from a starry night, to a field of sunflowers, to his portraits of ordinary humble folk.
Number one on my bucket list: Leave a wake of gentle kindness wherever I amble…
Anything else you'd like to add: The thing I loved most about journalism was its license to exercise an insatiable curiosity. And I've never sought to leave the world of non-fiction because in listening to and telling other people's stories, I've always said, truth is better than fiction. So very often, I'd find myself saying, "You can't make this stuff up." Journalism draws you into the depths of human nature, in all its quirks and glories.
Author Bio: Barbara Mahany is an author and freelance journalist in Chicago, who writes these days about stumbling on the sacred amid the cacophony of the modern-day domestic melee. She was a reporter and feature writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 30 years, and before that a pediatric oncology nurse at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, has been called “a field guide into the depths of your holiest hours;” Publishers Weekly named it one of their Top 10 religion books for Fall 2014. She has since written three other books, including her latest, The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season (2020), a compendium of mediations, essays, recipes, and prayers rooted in the depths of winter’s months, from Abingdon Press.
