Nancy Sue Paddock

Nancy Paddock was born Nancy Sue Pearson in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1942, the first of three daughters. In an essay titled “The Life We Had,” Nancy describes a warm and satisfying early family life. She graduated from St. Paul’s Johnson High School in 1960 and from the University of Minnesota in 1965 with a degree in English education. While teaching at North High in Minneapolis, she did graduate work in English literature and American Studies.

Nancy’s interest in writing was strong from the start. When she was quite young her mother gave her a notebook in which to keep a diary that would tell the ongoing story of her life, and that telling in one form or another flowed on through the decades of her life. She married poet and author Joe Paddock in 1975, and almost immediately they began working together, partners in poetry and much else, in an ongoing series of arts, humanities, and environmental projects.

She did residency work with COMPAS Writers and Artists in the Schools, and similar work with the Southwest Minnesota Arts and Humanities Council, and she served as a poet in residence with Minnesota Public Radio Station KRSW in Worthington. With Joe she worked full time for two years as a humanist in the 19 state American Farm Project from which the Land Stewardship Project evolved. As an outcome of this work Nancy wrote a one-woman environmental play titled Planting in the Dust. which was performed scores of times in environmental settings around the U.S. and Canada. In continuum with that work, with Joe Paddock and Carol Bly, she co-authored Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture.

Nancy’s poems appeared in a great many journals and anthologies, and she has published two chapbooks and four full length books of poetry: A Dark Light, Trust the Wild Heart, Cooking with Pavarotti, and Green Reaching. Trust the Wild Heart was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards.

She and Joe cared for Joe’s father, Bill Paddock, during the final year of his life, and on Bill’s passing, they moved into the old Paddock family home in Litchfield. In 1990, feeling the need for more stability, Nancy began work as an English teacher in the Litchfield High School. She took teaching very seriously, often working late into the night developing lesson plans and reading student essays.

In the 1990s Nancy’s parents, Ralph and Lois Pearson, began to suffer memory loss. and she and her sisters increasingly cared for them till out of necessity they entered a Minneapolis nursing home. At the very turn of the century, both died of Alzheimer’s, four days apart. Nancy began a family memoir about the slow and difficult demise of her parents, and she retired from teaching in 2005 in order to finish it. Titled A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer’s and Love, it is a wonderful book which won the 2012 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir.

Sadly, in a few short years Nancy began to show the same symptoms her parents had exhibited during their final years. Her slow sinking into dementia was clear, but she continued to write, especially poetry, till in 2016 she lost touch with what she had been creating. Cared for by Joe, Nancy was able to stay at home until December of 2022, when she entered Bethany Memory Care (such kind and loving care) in Litchfield where she passed away on May 4th of 2025.

She was preceded in death by her mother and father, Lois and Ralph Pearson, and by her sister Janet Pearson. She is survived by her husband Joe, her sister Virginia Pearson, her sister-in-law Shirley Scott, and Shirley’s many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren

There will be a celebration in poetry and memory of the life of Nancy Paddock at 1:30 Saturday, May 17, at the GAR Hall in Litchfield.