Kathleen Finneran, a writer and instructor at WashU, died on Feb. 14 (image sourced from WashU’s Department of English faculty webpage).

Kathleen Finneran, a beloved instructor and accomplished writer in WashU’s English department, passed away on Feb. 14 after a long battle with illness. She was 68.

Finneran taught nearly a thousand students over the course of two decades at WashU. She was a creative nonfiction writer and primarily taught introductory and advanced courses in the genre, including “Personal Essay and Memoir” and “Portraits and Profiles.” She was also instrumental in the creation of the nonfiction writing track within the English department’s prestigious Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing Program. 

Several of Finneran’s colleagues and friends, including English professor Edward McPherson, described her as kind, thoughtful, and attentive. Those qualities helped make her a great companion, a dedicated mentor to her students, and a gifted writer. 

“She had the most discerning eye for the sparkling, special thing in a student, friend, essay, or place,” McPherson said. 

English professor Mary Jo Bang, a close friend of Finneran’s, emphasized that one of her most remarkable qualities was the way her “keen intellect was married to her brilliant sense of humor.”

“When I told her I had found evidence of moths in a closet, knowing I was working on a series of poems about the Virgin Mary, she immediately exclaimed, ‘O Holy Mother of Moths!’” Bang wrote in an email to Student Life. “Her deftness with language was such that even a personal small-scale disaster could become the funniest moment of the day.” 

Several of Finneran’s students said she formed loving and enduring connections with many of those she taught. WashU MFA student Amaris Bouchard wrote a tribute to her former teacher, titled “On Getting the ‘Good’ Stationary,” and shared a version of it in an online forum dedicated to Finneran’s memory. 

“Kathleen convinces me that the bond between student and teacher is one forged through mutual delight,” Bouchard wrote in her tribute. “It is a sacred bond, structured upon respect. If one becomes close to a teacher, an intuitive grace unfolds, instructing us when to stay humble and when to be bold. The trust built between teacher and student lets both of them blossom with incessant reverie and mutual joy. The best teachers know how to balance criticism with adoration, training with permission. They acknowledge the strength of boundaries and the impact their heart can have on a student. Kathleen knew this balance well.”

An accomplished writer

Finneran was born and raised in the greater St. Louis area. In 2000, she published her memoir “The Tender Land: A Family Love Story,” a piece that reflects on her coming of age in the area and the loss of her younger brother, Sean, who died by suicide at age 15. The book received widespread acclaim from readers, fellow writers, and major newspapers, such as The Boston Globe and USA Today. 

Finneran’s memoir was the culmination of a decade of work, and, as McPherson put it, “a total masterpiece” in its final form.  

“It’s so good. It’s universally wise, but also so much about this city she loved and the people in it,” he said. “The subtitle is ‘A Family Love Story,’ which is sweet, but it’s a very heavy book. It brings up lots of sad material, but it’s written with such attention and care that it’s just luminous.” 

English professor David Schuman, a longtime friend of Finneran’s, said the memoir captures her generous spirit. 

“[It] is such an honest account of a really, really difficult part of her life, and it’s just so revealing,” he said. “As a writer or as a person, you don’t have to be honest. You can hold things back. And she just was not like that. She let people see inside. And I think that that’s a kind of generosity, too.” 

In addition to her writing being generous, Schuman said she was good at writing in all the ways one can be. 

“She was wonderful on the level of the sentence — sentences that reveal information in the most compelling ways,” he said. “She could go off on these spiraling digressions in a story, and then come back to where she started, and you never felt like you lost anything.”

Finneran also wrote essays published in the anthologies “The Place That Holds Our History,” “Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City,” “The ‘M’ Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage,” and “My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop.”

She received several awards over the course of her career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2001. 

A dedicated teacher and mentor

Finneran received her undergraduate degree from WashU in 2000. After living in New York for several years and then teaching at Webster University, the University of Missouri, and St. Louis Community College, she returned to WashU in 2005 as an instructor. During her time at the University, she taught and mentored hundreds of students.

Maya Samuels-Fair, who received her bachelor’s degree from WashU in 2020, said Finneran was deeply devoted to her students. 

“I think of all of the professors I’ve ever had, she was extremely invested in every single student that she interacted with, and she got to know us as people — what our interests were, where we came from,” Samuels-Fair said. “She remembered everybody’s birthday, everybody she ever met, and would always send a ‘happy birthday’ email.” 

Talya Zax, who graduated from WashU in 2014, had Finneran as both an academic advisor and a teacher. She said Finneran cultivated close relationships with students that sometimes endured long after they left her classroom. Their own friendship continued over a decade after Zax graduated from college. 

“[There was a] sense of really deep love,” Zax said. “I think love is not a word that enters into the relationship between professors and students all that often, but Kathleen really loved her students. You can tell when someone loves you, it’s an extremely powerful thing, and I knew that she loved me, and I loved her, so that’s the recipe, I guess.” 

In addition to her friends and students, Finneran cherished her family members, especially her nieces and nephews and her five grandnieces and grandnephews, all of whom survive her. She is also survived by her brother Michael (the late Sauni) Finneran, and sisters Mary Ellen (Daniel) Elder and Kelly Anne (Duane) Sonntag.

A thoughtful and generous friend

Several of Finneran’s colleagues and students described her as extraordinarily generous. McPherson said Finneran was someone who always created space for others and had a gift for forming deep connections. 

“She gave so many people so much,” he said. “It was like she could somehow bend space-time. I don’t know how she had time for everyone everywhere, but she made time for everyone everywhere.” 

Professor G’Ra Asim, a colleague and friend in the English department, described Finneran as “a great artist, an inspiring mentor, and a super solid hang.” He called it a “triple axel that not many people can pull off.”

Asim said that Finneran’s artistic gifts and qualities as a companion were connected. She moved through the world and engaged with others with an artist’s attentiveness and care.

“[She was] sensitive, observant, patient, attentive to [an individual’s] complexity — not trying to be one thing and not trying to make anyone else into one thing,” he said.

Finneran was someone who was comfortable with pauses and periods of silence. After Asim heard that she had passed away, he held two minutes of silence during each of his classes in tribute to her. 

“It felt appropriate because of Kathleen’s pace,” Asim said. “She was someone who was absolutely not determined to fill every silence. Since I share that sensibility, it was like being around her was kind of like an oasis. There [were] a lot of times when we were hanging out or talking, she could get lost in thought and then come back and communicate verbally.”

He said that during those moments of silence in his classes, he felt he was honoring something he admired about her and sharing a small part of that special quality with his students.

Unique passions and interests 

Several people close to Finneran spoke fondly of her distinctive passions and interests. She loved western films, the Mark Morris Dance Company, poetry, blowing glass, tiaras, moss, dahlias, cemeteries, and sitting on screened porches.

“She had very particular things about the world that she just absolutely loved, and she talked about them with so much sparkle,” Samuels-Fair said. “She would just capture her audience and talk about something that’s very much overlooked, like a cool old grave or a weird old movie, and everyone would just be enraptured.” 

McPherson said Finneran loved hay bales, and whenever he came across one, he would snap a photo of it and send it to her.

“I have so many blurry pictures of hay bales from the window of a train or a car. I [would] just send them to her,” he said. “When it was her anniversary of maybe 15 years at WashU, I bought a bunch of little miniature hay bales online and put them in her office.”

Finneran loved going on adventures, whether in or out of town. She often brought her colleagues and students to a variety of spots that might seem off the beaten path.

“She knew everything about St Louis, but she liked to try new things,” McPherson said. “So we’d go somewhere [or] just drive around, and then there’d be a weird building, and we’d just walk up to the building and knock on the door.”

Schuman said one of the moments he treasures with her took place several years ago, after she had an operation. He drove to Finneran’s sister’s house, where she was recovering, and took her out for a short drive through a state park. She spotted a turtle crossing the road and worried it might get run over. Schuman stopped to pick up the turtle and move it away from the road. 

“She told me to not send it back the way it was coming because turtles want to keep going the way they’re ‘supposed to be going,’” Schuman said. “So I had to take it across to the other side.” 

He said it felt like the kind of thing that would appear in her writing, but it was also just something unfolding in their lives. He continues to cherish that moment with her to this day. 

A memorial visitation for Finneran will be held on Saturday, Feb. 28, at 1 p.m., followed by a service at 3 p.m., at the Hutchen Mortuary & Cremation Center in Florissant. Individuals are invited to share tributes to Finneran online at: https://www.hutchensfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/Kathleen-M-Finneran?obId=47262095.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated at 7:55 a.m. on Feb. 23 to include an excerpt from Amaris Bouchard’s tribute to Finneran, titled “On Getting the ‘Good’ Stationary.”