Growing up without TV, I spent my childhood immersed in my siblings, books, animals, music, and the outdoors. I was a writin’ nerd who produced stacks of fully illustrated journals and poetry starting when I was 5 years old, but my first novel at 14, alas, disappeared in the attic of my haunted childhood home. That’s where I hid and read and wrote … and destroyed my grandmother’s summer clothing with archery practice on long winter afternoons.
I never loved school, quit high school early in the ’70’s (some would call me a dropout), and was an Early Entrant at Shimer College, which offered an all-original-sources Alfred Adler Great Books curriculum. I. Loved. It. Through Shimer I spent a year at Oxford University with tutors in Art History, and felt like I had come home for the first time in my life.
As time went on I married and had a family, got a masters in Early Childhood Curriculum, went back to teach and direct admissions at Shimer, then got remarried and doubled the size of my family. In 1994 I finished a doctorate in ministry to victims and perpetrators of violence, and was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist denomination in 1995. For years I worked as an education and training specialist at the Milwaukee Women’s Center, then the largest battered women’s services in the United States, and taught at Alverno, a progressive Catholic Women’s College in Milwaukee.
In 2003 I retired from full time front line domestic violence work, in May 2016 I fully retired from college-level teaching and itinerant preaching. But I remain a writin’ nerd, and am galloping along in that endeavor. As a former expert witness in murder cases, I lighten my spirit by playing Trad Celtic music on fiddle and harp, spinning, weaving, growing herbs, poisoning the minds of my grandchildren with stories of magic, and keeping very large dogs next to me at all times.
Bobbie Groth 