There are a few ways to describe Dan Barry. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, New York Times columnist and a father of two. Still, though, in his lengthy list of personal and professional accomplishments, Barry puts one fact alongside the rest: He’s a Bonnie.
Barry, class of ‘80, said coming back to campus is a strange experience, especially when he gave last year’s commencement speech.
Years before critical accolades and award ceremonies, a young Barry, unaware of the whirlwind of perspective-altering, journalistic ventures ahead, sat in front John F. McGillicuddy, the ‘80 commencement speaker.
Barry said that, prior to that graduation date, he began forming his writer’s voice—which, combined with perseverance, led him to the NYT.
Forming that voice began essentially from birth, Barry said.
His mother, an Irish immigrant, was “an amazing storyteller.”
His father, who grew up during the depression, was “angry at the system.”
“I have a voice but I didn’t set out to find a voice,” he said. “[My voice is] the accumulated influences of Ireland, Long Island, New York City, reading Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, reading the Daily News, reading the New York Times and, then, reading literature: poetry. And then, you know, combining it with outrage sometimes or a sense of poignancy or a sense of humor.”
Barry would begin exercising that culmination of influences, embodied in a love for the craft, while at Bonaventure.
According to Barry, he was drawn to Bonaventure because of its impressive journalism program.
He added that SUNY Oswego was a consideration, but that institution only had a communications department.
Barry appreciated Bonaventure’s natural beauty, too.
“I visited the campus once,” he said. “It was a friend’s father who was driving up, so, I saw the campus and liked it. It was clearly in a beautiful, verdant setting, compared to the ticky tacky subdivision I was living in [while] in Long Island.”
While on campus, Barry reveled in independence, eight hours from home.
“My parents never came up here until graduation,” Barry said. “They came effectively to pick me up four years later, but they never saw [the campus]. I wasn’t a parent’s weekend kind of guy.”
Barry lived on the fourth floor of Devereux Hall, too, which was also inhabited by some of his high school friends from St. Anthony’s High School in Smithtown, New York—a male-only, Franciscan school at the time.
“[Devereux Hall] was kind of an elevated version of Animal House,” Barry said, comparing his undergraduate living situation to a popular 70s comedy. “…I had a cohort of guys who all came up with our Long Island, smartass attitudes. It was definitely remote, but I was with other guys so I didn’t feel isolation at all.”
During the first semester of his freshman year, Barry had already gotten involved on campus.
“I didn’t try out to be a Brown Indian mascot—I mean, we had those,” he said. “I wasn’t going to be a male cheerleader or a campus escort because, you know, I was anti-establishment in many ways.”
Instead, Barry wrote for The Convex, an alternative, on-campus publication during his undergraduate years. The publication, advised by retired English professor Richard Simpson, Ph.D., had stemmed from The Laurel Magazine, Bonaventure’s literary publication.
He added that his attraction to The Laurel was partially rooted in its unorthodox methods.
To this day, Barry calls Simpson one of his mentors.
“Someone was starting a new magazine called The Convex…that’s how I got involved,” he said. “I think the first story I did was some kind of investigation of the student governance (now called the Student Government Association)…and I think we saw ourselves as the alternative watchdogs.”
Of course, Barry’s experiences with The Convex would only be the beginning of his award-winning career in journalism.
Post graduation, Barry worked at a deli and dug ditches.
Then, after this short journalistic hiatus, he moved on to two small-size publications, joining the The Journal Inquirer, a Manchester, Connecticut-based publication, in 1983 and then the Providence Journal-Bulletin in 1987.
Barry would then join the NYT in 1995, initially working for the metropolitan desk.
Since 2007, Barry has written the “This Land” column for the NYT, which “takes readers beneath news stories and into obscure and well-known corners of the United States,” the publication’s website said.
Naturally, that column would bring Barry across the country—all fifty states to be exact.
In “This Land,” Barry tells human interest stories—the kind that might remain untold otherwise.
These stories alter opinions, question long-held truths and shed light on the marginalized, unnoticed and underappreciated.
In all his success, though, Barry still says Bonaventure played a major part in the fine-tuning of his storytelling and he hopes current and future Bonnies feel that same influence.
mcgurllt14@bonaventure.edu
