About Phyllis Barber

I was born in the Rose de Lima Hospital in Basic Townsite, Nevada (later known as Henderson) because the hospital had been closed in Boulder City. My parents were Herman and Thora Nelson. My only given name was Phyllis Nelson. My mother said that middle names made life too complicated, though Phyllis is a name I’ve never cottoned up to, to tell you the truth. I do like what it means: “a green bough” or “any pretty country maiden.” Not bad, though I would have preferred Elizabeth or Anne.

We lived in Boulder City, Nevada, on the edge of the desert until I was eleven years old. Then our family moved to another edge of the desert, this time in Las Vegas. The shift from a government town (which was built to build Hoover Dam) and a high sense of order (Boulder City was still a Federal Reservation in 1954), jarred my sense of safety and felt more like a move into the windblown chaos of an alien world.

Attending Las Vegas High School, I won a position as a Las Vegas Rhythmette (a big-time thing for the girls of that day and age), played the piano for school assemblies and at a classical ballet studio, then attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where I met David Barber at the end of my sophomore year. We were married a year later in 1964 and moved to Palo Alto, California, where he attended Stanford Law School. After working at the Stanford Development Office for a year, I attended San Jose State College (before it became a university) and completed a degree in music with a piano emphasis and a minor in political science.

After deciding that becoming a serious concert pianist was not a viable route for me (after giving birth to four sons), I turned to writing at age 32. It seemed I had no choice other than to follow the demands of my strong creative impulses in one field or another. I wrote for Utah Holiday magazine in Salt Lake City, Utah, for ten years, took creative writing classes at the University of Utah, then received an MFA in Writing Degree at Vermont College in 1984.

My first book was commissioned in 1980 by a small publishing firm in Provo, Utah, which was looking for easy readers for juvenile readers. With this acceptance, I was definitely bitten by the possibility of becoming a “real” writer. And following this desire, writing, in both the imaginative and literal sense, became the way I used to explain myself to myself and make sense of the twists and turns in the path of my life.

Currently, I teach at the school from which I received an MFA–the low-residency writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vermont (since 1991). I currently live in Denver, Colorado, where I can be close to my three living sons, their wives, their four children.

Will Rogers said something to the effect that one can only fully appreciate the day when one has seen the sunset. Though I’m not riding into the sunset just yet, I do understand what he meant. Life is good. I’m glad I’m still here.