Saturday, January 14, 2017
I am so sorry to learn about Dr. Nurmi's death, and I offer all of her family my sympathy. I was one of her many students at Mount Union, my future husband and I were in her Chaucer class, and she attended my wedding to Gary in July 1972! I was sorry to have lost touch with her when she and Martin left Kent.
She meant so much to me, as I know she meant to many others at Mount Union. Her classes were wonderful -- challenging, lively, memorable. I still have my notes from her Emily Dickinson seminar, and I can remember how thrilled I was to have a whole quarter to spend on her poetry with a professor who cared so about the language of a woman writer. I am an English professor today at Otterbein University (and a Virginia Woolf scholar) because of her suggestion that I might consider graduate school. She listened to me in office hours, she taught me additional research skills on her own time, and her teaching methods still inform my own. She touched my mind AND my heart, and I will always remember her kindness to a young woman finding her way.
My deepest sympathy to you all, Beth (MUC '72)
