Barbara Mahany, a former pediatric oncology nurse, spent nearly three decades as a reporter and writer at the Chicago Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and the author of five books, including four collections of essays. Her latest book, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books), will be published on the next vernal equinox, March 21, 2023. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Press, October 2014), has been called “balm for the hurried heart,” and “a field guide into your holiest hours.” Her second book, Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving (Abingdon Press, April 2017), explores the sacred mysteries of mothering — its sorrows, joys, trembles, hallelujahs, and the tumble of questions without answers.

Her third and fourth books, The Blessings of Motherprayer (Oct. 2018) and The Stillness of Winter (Oct. 2020), are distillations of her first two books; considered “gift books,” in the trade vernacular (which basically means pretty little books you might delight in holding in your hand, or tucking in your pocket, or slipping onto your bedside table). But since Mahany always thinks of something new to say, both Blessings and Stillness are fat with new essays, recipes, and wonders picked up along the way.

Mahany had once dreamed of becoming a pediatric nurse practitioner, opening an inner-city clinic to care for women and children. But, shortly after her father’s funeral in 1981, after the priest ended the burial Mass by reading to the packed church the Christmas letter she’d written her father just two months before, someone — the head of her dad’s ad agency — took her to lunch and said, “Kid, you can write. Have you ever thought of journalism?”

She walked home along Chicago’s lakefront that afternoon, dialed Northwestern University’s Medill Graduate School of Journalism, and asked if they might have a spot for a nurse. Barely a year after that first “would-you-have-room-for-me?” phone call, she graduated from Medill at the top of her class, and scored an internship at the Chicago Tribune upon graduation. Just a few weeks into the internship, after she landed a Sunday front-page byline with her story about Mother Theresa’s nuns coming to one of the poorest parishes on Chicago’s West Side, the Tribune’s old-school metro editor swaggered across the newsroom and asked her if she was interested in a full-time job. That was the summer of 1982.

Ever since, she’s been drawn to deeply human stories, where she has displayed a nurse’s knack for tapping into the hearts of those whose story she is telling.

She counts among her life’s treasures the hundreds of letters she’s received from readers who tell her they’ve clipped one of her stories and tucked it in a wallet, a bedroom drawer, or slipped it in a plastic sleeve and carried it wherever they’ve gone. One such fellow, the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square, who was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver one cold December’s eve, died clutching a laminated copy of the story she had written about him three years earlier.

During her nearly 30 years at the Tribune, Mahany spent the first five years on the city desk, covering breaking news and trolling for trend stories in the city and suburbs.

While on the news desk, she wrote a 10-part series on “Hunger in America,” covered the abduction and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, and eventually covered both the trial and retrial of the three alleged killers of the Naperville schoolgirl. In between those trials, in 1986, she and John Kass, now a Tribune columnist, pieced together and wrote a 3,000-word front-page story alleging that another man, Brian Dugan, had in fact kidnapped, raped and murdered the fifth-grader who was home alone from school the day she disappeared. (In 2009, Dugan finally plead guilty to the crimes, and was on Death Row until 2011, when Ill. Gov. Pat Quinn commuted that sentence to life in prison.)

During her news-reporting years, Mahany was dispatched for a few months to Washington, D.C., to work on the Iran-Contra investigations, and when Prince Charles came to Chicago, she recorded in her notebook every dip and twirl as he took to the ballroom with the ladies of the Oak Brook Polo Club.

She then moved to the Features department, where, for a quarter century, her beat was a broad one. She chronicled Chicago’s Social Register set; her marching orders from then-editor Jim Squires: “Treat Society as news, and view it as sociology.”

Once her proverbial Little Black Dress was worn to threads, she piled her features plate with plenty: from a front-seat profile of the Truck Driver of the Year, riding cross-country in an 18-wheeler, to a tale of Jell-O wrestlers, or, at the far other end of civility, the quirks of fox hunting. And, in a years-long series of stories, she spent months documenting everyday families as they navigated life’s passages — a young couple’s first birth, the slow death of a father of four, another couple emptying the nest as they sent the last of four kids off to college, or another family up and moving cross country when the dad took a faraway job.

During her last assignment at the Tribune, she was, for three years, part of the National Content team writing lifestyle stories — garden, health, family, food, books, travel and home, among the subjects — for eight Tribune newspapers and websites around the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Orlando Sentinel.

While at the Tribune, Mahany met and married Blair Kamin, the Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. They have two sons, Will and Teddy, whom they call their double bylines — their best ones, ever. By far.

On her last day at the Tribune, Mahany wrote this on “pull up a chair,” her long-running blog where she explores the heart and soul of the homefront:

i decided a while back that my own private chapter closing would be the day i climb to the attic and sift through the boxes and crates of old yellowed newspaper clips, to read and remember, to run my fingers over the grainy photos from long ago, to absorb through and through the holy walk that was this chapter.

there is much to remember as i flip through the pages of all of the years.

my favorites?