Beloved English instructor closes 40-year chapter this August

Yana McGuire | Staff Writer 

Sunlight from the large window shone on the collection of diverse books beautifully displayed behind Maryam Barrie, WCC English and writing professor, as she quietly reflected on her career. 

For 40 years, Barrie has inspired students and faculty with her devotion to developing students’ interests in reading and artistic writing. However, as this semester comes to a close, one of the most influential English professors WCC has ever seen will be logging out of her Zoom classroom for the last time. Barrie is set to retire in August of this year. 

Barrie’s commitment stems from her own humble beginnings. 

“I was pretty certain as a young woman that I would never go to college,” Barrie said. “I was a high school dropout. I took the GED and felt like school sucks.”

School was boring for Barrie. Although she generally did well in school, she just didn’t like being there. 

In 1981, Barrie enrolled at WCC and met three English teachers who changed her life for the better. Hal Weidner, Laureen Erickson and the late Dan Minnick, who saw her potential and began to develop it. 

“With those three teachers, I was able to be like an apprentice teacher,” Barrie fondly recalls as she leaned back in her chair enough for the sunlight to hit the slight smile on her face. “They would say, why don’t you develop a handout on personal poems or a handout on something else? I would get terribly excited about that.”

Her excitement and leadership led her to a position as a WCC writing center tutor before she became a part-time English instructor in 1985. For the next 12 years, while working part-time, Barrie continued to expand her knowledge by earning a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan and then her Master’s degree at Eastern.

During that time, she met her husband and had two children. Barrie recalls how great this time of her life was because she had the “best of both worlds”. 

“They (Barrie’s daughters) both did homeschool a bit at Washtenaw,” Barrie recalls. “So, they would read underneath my desk. I’d be talking to a student, and they’d look over and see, like, oh, there’s a body under there.” 

In 2002, Barrie started teaching full-time at WCC.    

According to her colleagues, Barrie has been a pioneer of the English department’s cultural growth.   

“She (Barrie) really developed our literature of the non-western world, which brought a world consciousness to our literature program,” Thomas Zimmerman, WCC’s writing center director and English professor, said. “It was groundbreaking because it brings in the whole idea of global culture, and not just the American or the European American perspective.”  

Zimmerman, who has been with WCC since 1992, remembers how hard it was for anything outside of European literature to be accepted, and believes Barrie is a key factor in the modern style of instruction.

“I admire her adventurousness and her great humanity in doing that,” Zimmerman said.

“She helped to accelerate my awareness and acceptance of the fact that there’s a big world out there,” Zimmerman said. “Her moral perspective was very important to me, in a lot of ways, making me a better person and certainly a better teacher.”

Barrie served as president of the faculty union for a long time and was thought of as a sane and sensible leader, according to Zimmerman,

However, when asked what she would like her legacy at WCC to be, Barrie effortlessly replied that she wanted “people excited to pursue writing that makes them feel alive.” 

“If students have authors that I’ve introduced them to that they’re excited to read, that would be great,” Barrie said.

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