This post was written by Shay Potter, MFA '25.
On a bright spring morning, Jane Delury bent down to smell the white, yellow-centered perennials blooming near the Japanese maple hedges at Baltimore's Cylburn Arboretum.
City sounds disappeared behind a wall of maple, oak and pine trees. Thirty minutes ago, the University of Baltimore English professor worried about her department meeting. But now, standing in the gardens just six miles from campus, she practiced what she teaches—sensory immersion.
"We've become detached from the sensory world," she said, noting how technology and busy schedules diminish our connection to physical spaces. “Even in my own writing, I recognize I am losing touch. So, my desire is to get students out in the world.”
Delury's passion for green spaces originated in her Sacramento childhood and deepened during the years she lived in France.
“When I moved to France in my 20s, I'd say the first garden that's actually in my first book, The Balcony, was the first garden I fell in love with. It belonged to my ex-husband's grandfather, and was on the edge of a forest that also appears in the book. So that garden and that forest just became this magical space for me, and I started writing stories about them.”
This connection with place, gardens and history anchored both of her novels—The Balcony and The Hedge—and shaped her teaching philosophy for The University of Baltimore, where she primarily teaches English majors.
"It's important to bring my life as a writer into the classroom.”
This is Delury's barometer, and it echoes throughout the creative writing curriculum she’s adapted over her 25 years at UBalt.
Through her Writing Baltimore class, Delury leverages the city's 4,000 acres of green spaces as living classrooms. Day trips to Green Mount Cemetery, Jones Falls Trail and Blue Light Junction challenge her students to engage all five senses—a deliberate antidote to the creative drought she observed in increasingly screen-focused lives.
“In my teaching, I've become more of a place-focused teacher,” she said. “I found that if a student, who is a new writer, holds a magnifying glass up to a place that they know and the people that lived in it, it's all there. They have everything they need.”
Following the shutdowns enforced as part of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Delury noticed her first-year students overlooking the wonders of their own everyday lives. Her students told her things like, “I don't like writing,” “I don't know what to write about,” “I don't have a story. Nothing interesting ever happened.”
Her response was simple.
"I tell them to start on the street they grew up on, and it opens them up. There's all of this beautiful, concrete detail. There are all of these interesting characters. There's conflict. There's everything you need right there on that street,” Delury said. “I want everybody to find their own way, find their own style, their own subject."
Last fall, Michael Moore, a 22-year-old first-year undergraduate, traveled weekly from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to attend Delury's course.
"Being in nature helps me think clearly," he explained. "Walking and looking at different scenery expands my thinking."
While embracing these traditional sensory experiences, Delury contemplated how the future of English studies would look while emerging technologies make their way into the classroom.
"We incorporate technology into almost all of our English classes—podcasting, reels, even ChatGPT. We're always thinking how can our students get jobs? How can they be on the vanguard? That's the spirit of the University," she said.
This creative freedom enabled her to continuously evolve her teaching methods while helping students discover stories hidden in everyday surroundings in the city.
Inside the glass-paneled dome of the Rawlings Conservatory, a bird flapped overhead, catching Delury by surprise. She drew her gaze upward with a smile as she listened to its song. Then her eyes moved across the length of the sunlit conservatory.
She noted the mundane—the smooth bark and rough bark, a fusion of vibrant petals and glossy leaves. She was present, all her senses engaged. New ideas swirled in her mind.
“I want to read the history now,” she said, excited about discovering more about the gardens and structures around her. “I'm going to go home today and find out who worked in that mansion, the greenhouses and when they were built.”
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