Barbara Mahany’s essay collections take the form of what she calls “field notes,” one of the tools of the scientist to observe and record phenomena. But her subject matter lies beyond measure – spirituality, love, faith. Nature forms the connection; Mahany finds much of her inspiration in the seasonal cycles and everyday miracles of the natural world. While her debut book, Slowing Time (2014), featured a year of seasonally themed essays sprinkled with calendars, lists, spaces for readers to add their own notes, and even recipes, her new one, The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season (Abingdon Press), takes a similar approach but zeros in on a single season.

A veteran reporter at the Chicago Tribune, Mahany worked closely at the newspaper with editor Nancy Watkins and although both have departed the Tribune, as it happened on the same day in 2012, they have continued their editor-reporter repartee.  Because asking questions of reporters is what she does, Watkins interviewed Mahany for The National.

Q: What’s behind this idea of scientific observation and measurement applied to topics that defy science and data?

A: Being a science geek from way back, I am awestruck at the bewilderments of nature: how the honeybee finds its hive, how baby birds memorize the night sky while still in the nest, how the monarch finds its way thousands of miles to the very eucalyptus grove of an earlier generation. In paying exquisite attention to the quiet unfoldings of the natural world, to the rhythms of heavens and earth, I find myself rapt and looking straight into the mystery that, to me, is Holiness with a capital H. The more closely I examine the hard science of botany or ornithology or astronomy, the more I am struck by the sheer beauty and wonder of the ineffable, which again brings me clear to the edge of a certainty: only divine imagination could have dreamed up all of this, and how blessed we are to be dwelling among it.

Q: Winter might seem at first like a strange choice — some people dread it and even see it as a time of death. Why is that the season you focus on?

A: Because, from a botanic perspective, it’s the beginning. It’s the season of imperceptible growing, deep underground, and I’ve long found the parallels between botany and theology to be stirring. I am a winter baby by birth and at heart. I’m certain it has something to do with my Celtic and monastic roots. Darkness entices me; shadow’s complexities engage me far more than a bright and unbroken canvas of sunlight. Plus, it’s the chance to shake ourselves off and start the ascent once again: the promise of the new beginning. 

Q: The title of your book suggests what I’m guessing was one of your biggest challenges in writing it: stillness. In that way (and only that way!) it reminds me of Seinfeld, the “show about nothing.” Was that as hard as it sounds, to write about a season of watching and waiting?

A: [Recovers from spitting out her coffee laughing at the Seinfeld reference] Stillness to me is far from nothing! It’s as thick and hard to reach as anything I aim for. It’s a spiritual practice, a contemplative posture, that takes a lifetime of, well, practice. Trying over and over to sink into that deep well of quietude that allows us to be immersed in the sacred, the holy, to hear the still, small voice. Once my publisher approached me with the idea of distilling Slowing Time into a book focused on winter, I dove right in. Winter to me is as multifaceted as the one-of-a-kind architecture of every snowflake. To learn to wait and watch, to watch and wait, is a practice that’s challenged a litany of seekers through all of time, from the Zen Buddhist priests, the medieval mystics, the Transcendentalists, clear through to the poets of today, the Mary Olivers, the David Whytes, the W. S. Merwins, all of whom bequeathed us tracings of the astonishments they found on their watch.

Q: You’ve been writing your blog, Pull Up a Chair, since 2006. Some of the essays in The Stillness of Winter started out as blog posts, right? When you went over them to choose and adapt them for the book, did you find that you had changed? Did you edit them much?

A: Absolutely. Plenty immediately were pitched to the recycle bin. Others I kept, with some tweaking to account for the passage of time. Part of what I hold on to in any of the essays is the fresh-capture sense of the way I wrote in real time. I’m grateful for the writing practice that taught me to seize the moment before it faded or dulled. I’ve likened my task to being a butterfly catcher, trying to net the ephemeral, only my net is one woven in words. And what I’ve netted, I hope, is worthy of closer examination — a record of epiphanies and moments worth considering again and again.

Q: Along with your family, there are two other recurring characters: a pair of cardinals. Do they signify something to you that other creatures of a Midwestern winter do not?

A: Against the washed-out tableau of winter, a blur of grays and whites, the shock of the male cardinal’s red is always a startlement. And because the cardinals are monogamous pairs, the female – whose feathered composition is muted russets with tinges of red – is never far behind. Their devotion is quite something to behold. I’ve witnessed a cardinal belting out lament for days on end after her mate was taken down by the neighborhood hawk. The piercing sadness of her cry hasn’t left me all these years later. Because they’re so easily identifiable, the cardinal is a great “beginner” bird, an easy starting point into the bird-watching world. My deeply urban husband has taken a shine to the red bird of winter, and seeing his joy amplifies mine.

Q: First you were a pediatric oncology nurse, then a newspaper reporter. Now you write about faith and spirituality. That’s quite a career path! How does this experience inform your writing?

A: Oh, gosh, I’ve thought about this circuitous path quite often over the years. First, being a nurse taught me to pay exquisite attention. In nursing, your observations — from the rise and fall of someone’s chest as they’re breathing, to the hue of blue around a little girl’s lips to gauge the lack of her oxygen — are often matters of life and death. At the Chicago Tribune, I found myself using that attention to detail in the telling of other people’s often-intimate stories. In time, when I became a mother, I realized that some of the stories unfolding on my own watch — in the humble confines of my kitchen, tucking my boys into their beds, or driving them back and forth to baseball or soccer — raised questions I often asked through a spiritual lens.

Q: After many years of news writing, where you’re expected to be objective and to keep yourself out of the story, is it liberating to write such personal material now? Or is it harder?

A: It’s a whole different level of hard. Though I felt truly naked at first, putting my soul on the page, I’ve always believed that it’s the most vulnerable writing that hews closest to the bone. And if we’re going to take up oxygen with our words, we might as well dare to put our whole truth on the page. It’s where true communion is possible. The vulnerability sometimes leaves me shaking. And that’s when I know I might have written something that’s lasting.

Q: I love the recipes! But this is a book about finding the sacred in the world around you. What’s the connection?

A: It’s about finding the sacred, but it’s also an ode to joy. And to me the kitchen — and the cookstove, in particular — is something of a holy place. An altar, if you will. A place where incantations give rise to the miraculous, to deliciousness, to something that might fill the belly — and the soul besides. P.S., my editor was a great Southern lady who thrills to recipes, even though she swears she couldn’t begin to butter and flour a baking pan. And she kept asking for more, more, more.

Q: You’re an interfaith household — you’re Catholic, and your husband, the “tall, bespectacled fellow with whom I reside,” is Jewish. What do the different rituals mean to you, and have you come up with your own?

A: From the very beginning, the intertwining of our religions has been at the core of who we are, as individuals, as a couple, and as a family (we raised our boys in both religions, a path not often taken at the time). Going all the way back to high school, I’ve always been fascinated by Judaism and Jewish practices. A priest and a rabbi co-officiated our wedding, under a chuppah and the cathedral of trees in my mother’s garden. Our first Friday night Shabbat dinner was the one we made the week we got home from our honeymoon — and every week since. My own deep spirituality has been magnified by the prayers and the poetry of the ancient Hebrew poets and prophets. The creation-centered spirituality of an agrarian tribe (the Jews) has ignited and enflolded me. The commandments to see the stars, the timing of candle-lighting by the hour of sunset, it’s all glorious to me. And so, as a family, we’ve carved Jewish practices — and a Catholic commitment to living the Gospel — into our everyday. I’ve collected a library of great Jewish recipes from my phalanx of adopted Jewish mothers. (My own mother-in-law would be the first to admit she’s something of a flop in the kitchen, with no interest at all in passing along her nonexistent heirloom recipe box.) I love the hours I spend in synagogue, as well as the candlelit nave of my great stone church. It’s an ongoing journey for each of us, and for me it only deepens and deepens.

Q: Speaking of rituals — after 14 years, do you still sit down every Friday to write your blog? Do you have any other writing rituals?

A: Every single Friday. Religiously. No other rituals other than jealously guarding this slot of time. I even scribbled it onto my calendar sometimes, back in the days before COVID-19 when I might otherwise need to block out the chance for a meeting or appointment or even a coffee date. I rise early, often ferry a tin of birdseed out to the feeders, wait for my coffee to brew, whisper a prayer (or three), and then I dive in.

Q: Motherprayer focused on motherhood. How you walk the line between writing with honesty and protecting the privacy of your family?

A: Great question, and again one I’ve thought hard about and adjusted over the years. There are volumes I can’t and wouldn’t write. The stories I do choose to tell are stories that point to some larger question. My boys’ emotional lives are off limits. Strictly. So is my marriage. Once in a while I allude to the fact that I have one, but my husband, who has a byline of his own [at the Tribune], shouldn’t be subjected to my whims and storytelling. When my younger one was little, a kindergartner when I started Pull Up a Chair, he delighted in being the subject of a blog post. He grew accustomed to seeing me scribble down words when he’d said something adorably sweet or wise, or both. And it got to the point that if he thought he’d said something worthy of a quote, but didn’t see my reaching for my pen, he’d pause and take on a querulous look till I’d duly recorded the wisdom. In time, he declared that the statute of limitations had been passed and from that point on — middle school — I was not allowed to write a word about him without first submitting it for his approval. The Committee on Social Thought, I called him.

Q: On the home page of your website, you describe yourself as a “journalist, essayist, collector of stories.” Eight years after leaving newspapering, do you still see yourself as a journalist first?

A: I will always first and most be informed by the spoken and unspoken principles and rules of the road of journalism. I take to heart the ethics of journalism, the obsession with accuracy, the strict attention to grammar, punctuation, and all those copy-editing nitpicks. I loved being a journalist, being trusted to get to the truth of the matter, no matter the complexities and obfuscations that stood in the way. My husband made fun of me for years for claiming “journalist” — instead of the simpler, more straightforward “reporter” — as my occupation on our income tax returns. It mostly boils down to the fact that I’m a sentimental soul and I can’t bear to let go of the things I once loved. And I loved being a big-city scribe. It will always be a part of me as much as my middle name.

Q: Which is?

A: Ann, as in BAM. 

A newspaper editor for 30 years, Nancy Watkins has worked for such publications as the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business and Rotary magazine. She is now an editor based in Oregon.