Interview with Bobbie Groth
by Nightingale Editor Megan Otto
Bobbie Groth is an author, historian, and survivor of sexual violence. She is an accomplished interdisciplinary artist, having worked in both visual and literary mediums, and she has become a familiar presence with Awakenings, both online and in the gallery.
Groth displayed visual artwork in the Awakenings Fall 2018 exhibit, “Our Bodies Remember.” She also published an Awakened Voices serialized piece titled “Gifts from Her Table,” and an essay titled “Out of the Night that Covers Me” with The Nightingale. Her work at large has covered family history, women’s history, magic, spirituality, her own life experience, as well as the larger conversation around survivors and issues of sexual violence.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Bobbie Groth over email about her career, her creative process, and her thoughts on writing as a survivor. Groth’s strength in gentleness comes through in conversation as much as it does in her work, and it’s clear that she shares her lovely spirit readily, both in life and with the audiences who encounter her writing.
Megan Otto
Can you share how you’d like to introduce yourself?
Bobbie Groth
I had a career in the ministry working with persons affected by violence and sexual abuse, things I am a survivor of, and retired at 63 to focus more fully on my art and writing.
Megan Otto
Are there are parts of your identity that especially influence your work?
Bobbie Groth
I think that my gender, female, has much to do with my work, because I got into it as a survivor of both childhood sexual abuse and adult domestic violence, something I share with the majority of other females. It’s not that males don’t get abused or raped, but for women, it is a given that we will be targeted for sexual violences in particular, and live in households, communities, and nations with social and cultural infrastructures that keep us “in our place” with sexual and other forms of violence and control. My identity as a survivor affects my work in two ways: I often have chosen as a subject for my written and artistic work the stories of women around the world and throughout the ages who have struggled to survive and protect their children. But I also seek through my written and artistic work to get release from the wounds of violence through colors or words that evoke a sense of mystery, awe, and magic. A world of beauty.
Megan Otto
How and when did you start writing?
Bobbie Groth
I started writing when I was about 5. My grandmother gave me a blank bound notebook—I still have it!—that I used to make journal entries, write poems, and draw pictures in. At the very beginning of course my writing was very primitive, but as I went through school and really learned to write, the entries get more legible and understandable. In my family we tell stories to children to amuse them, and that’s been a part of me for so long, I just feel like it’s an element of my being. Of course, as I read books I also tried to write them—when I was 14 I finished writing a novel. How I wish I could find it now! But I also wrote essays, poems, short stories, and of course novels. I found so much solace in books that I just naturally began to write.
Megan Otto
What generally inspires you as a writer?
Bobbie Groth
Anything I feel I want to invent for the world to see, but it usually has to do with the life of someone—someone’s challenges, feelings, thoughts, triumphs. All the interesting things that can happen to a person in their life. I always felt like I wanted to live more than one life, and through reading and writing I can experience multiple lives. I have a particular interest in things that are connected with nature and the forces of the universe, how the individual can become aware of this amazing world of so many dimensions that we live in.
Megan Otto
Your visual art has been featured in the Awakenings gallery, and your writing has appeared in Awakened Voices. Can you tell us about what these different mediums offer you as a creator, and what writing in particular allows you to explore in art?
Bobbie Groth
Both of these mediums allow me to create universes of possibility, uncover the secret stories that never get told, convey a feeling to whoever views or reads my work, that they can then harmonize or resonate with. With my creative art, I go for absolute feeling—the central part of the being that I express on canvas or in sculpture, the soul of that being. With writing, I am able to voice those feelings more articulately—to show how they impact a life by describing how a person thinks and acts as a result of their pasts. I think writing also allows me to expand on the impacts of experience and share it, to open up experiences to others to take where they will. Just writing about this is inspirational to me!
Megan Otto
Can you tell us about your process of writing? When writing about difficult topics, is there something that helps you take care of yourself?
Bobbie Groth
My process of creative writing evolves with the piece that I am working on. Often it starts as an idea or fleeting image written on a piece of paper or notebook (now my phone!!) in my purse. I do a lot internally for sometimes a year or more, or sometimes a short period of time, depending on the opportunities I have to actually sit down and write. At some point it just feels right to begin the actual writing. I used to think that I had to have a very clear idea of where I was going with the piece before beginning, and that proved to really just provide me with writer’s block. One day I just started to free write, and I realized I’m more like the sculptor who says: “How do you carve an elephant? Why, you get a piece of stone and cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant!” I think I write that way too—I write quantities of feelings and ideas and impressions, and then I begin to cut things away, and organize what is left in a narrative that I then flesh out more. This makes writing a very long process for me, because I do a lot of editing!! (Somehow, however, if I need to write something that is short and very direct, I can just sit down and do it!) Sometimes I end up in a totally different place than I thought I was headed, and sometimes I just have to put a piece away for years, and then when I look at it later, I realize that I have a direction for it now, and I pick it up again. in the way I have shared it.
Megan Otto
How do you know when your writing is ready to be shared?
Bobbie Groth
I am a very private writer and wouldn’t even share my work with my husband until after it was already published!! That was a hard road. I’ve joined some writer’s groups over the years, which helped me get over the fear of sharing my work in its unfinished form. It’s also where I learned that someone can be critical of your work, without you having to think you have to please them or change it. I first heard this from my mentor in writing children’s books when I was in high school. Author Keith Robertson told me: “If you feel like you’ve written what you want to say, don’t allow a publisher or anyone else tell you that you have to change it, unless you want to. It’s YOUR work, and you need to stand firm with what your work looks like.” I still don’t share my work until I am quite sure that it is nearly ready to release. I at first read it out loud to myself and make the changes in wording and content that doing so shows as necessary. After that point, I often share it with several people who help me by proofreading (something I’m very bad at because my brain fills in the right info so I can’t even see my mistakes!!) But you asked, how do I know my writing is ready to be shared? I know my writing is ready to be shared when I finally start to feel I have gotten to the heart of what I want to express, and I need someone to tell me if they are getting what that is, and if not, what they think is missing. Again, I may or may not take their advice, but it is helpful for me to hear it. Once I’ve processed the feedback from those people that I trust (which includes my husband, LOL!) I usually feel it is ready to be shared.
Megan Otto
What do you hope your audience will take away from your work after reading it?
Bobbie Groth
What I hope the audience will take away from my work after reading it is a) to hear an interesting story or point of view; b) to learn something about someone who is very like them or very different from them; c) to be inspired to act on something, or to feel better about something that bothers them; and d) to enjoy the experience.
Megan Otto
Are there other writers or artists who inspire or challenge you?
Bobbie Groth
I am most inspired by writers Barbara Kingsolver, Ellis Peters, Mary Wollstonecraft, Noam Chomsky, William Blake and Julian of Norwich. I am most challenged by the art of the prehistoric people who carved into the stone monuments in Ireland, Scotland, and Denmark and Sweden, and also Marc Chagall.
Megan Otto
Do you have advice for other artists/writers who identify as survivors?
Bobbie Groth
If I think I have advice at all for survivors it would be things like: you are not abnormal—you are reacting to intolerable life experiences in a very human way. Just because you were injured by those things, it doesn’t make you “less” in any way, or irreparably “damaged.” You have much resulting wisdom to share, and insights that others need, but it is up to you whether you want to share it—you are under no obligation to help others, although I know that survivors often find that very healing in itself. Your privacy is worth protecting, so don’t feel you have to get out of your comfort box until you are ready. PTSD—I try to think of it as “Post Traumatic Stress Divinity” because I try to think more of the transformational possibilities of trauma in bringing insight into why violence should not, cannot, and will never, be the answer to human problems—for me a key spiritual grounding. All that being said, I would advise survivors whether at the beginning of their healing journey or further along in it to explore any and all forms of art—writing, music, visual arts, dance etc—for all the ways they can help disclosure to self and others, expression of trauma and beauty, and also, as means to further the process of healing and spiritual grounding and renewal. I have seen survivors use the arts in incredible ways—ways that would never occur to me. That is why I am so drawn to the mission of Awakenings, because every artist there brings new possibilities to other survivors all along the way.
Megan Otto
What are you working on right now? What’s next for you?
Bobbie Groth
I am currently near to completion of my 4th novel, a fictional biography of my great-great-grandfather, the Unitarian (my denomination) missionary to the Kansas Territory in the “Bleeding Kansas” years right before the civil war. I wrote a nonfiction book on his life for my denomination, but there were so many aspects of his life that came to me through undocumented family stories that I just didn’t feel “done” with that project. An autobiographical manuscript of his recounting his life in Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War was lost at his death, and I finally decided to combine all the research I had done into his life with the family stories, to try to write a more full account of his adventurous life story and complicated difficult character, and how he dealt with his traumatic encounters with political violence. I am in the last stages of editing this manuscript, not sure what I’ll do with it, but I’m pretty excited about it. I have a few ideas for my next writing on the back burner too—they are strictly “for fun” topics. In the realm of visual arts I am still absorbed by primitive and Celtic art, and continue to explore painting that incorporates those images and where it leads my imagination.
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You can learn more about Bobbie Groth’s work at her website, https://bobbiegroth.wordpress.com/.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005BZFZU4
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4946367.Bobbie_Groth
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BobbieGrothAuthor/?modal=admin_todo_tour