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Judith Strasser: NPR Journalist Becomes
Author, Poet, and Writing Teacher

I retired in 1999 from Wisconsin Public Radio, where I'd worked for eight years as senior producer and interviewer for To the Best of Our Knowledge, a nationally-syndicated public radio program.  Before that, as the mother of two young sons, I'd had a spotty and part-time "career" as a grant-writer and free-lance print and broadcast journalist, publishing articles in The Christian Science Monitor, Mademoiselle, and other national periodicals, and producing radio documentaries and audio tapes for distance learning courses.  I also did a lot of volunteer work: I headed the group of volunteers that started the Madison (Wisconsin) Children's Museum, and I worked for several years at Madison's community radio station, WORT, as a grant-writer and news producer.

In 1981, when I was 37 and my children were 3 and 6 years old, I was
diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a curable form of lympatic cancer.  After a year of chemotherapy and radiation, I realized that I had to figure out who I really was, and what I really wanted to do with whatever years I had left.  I'd been very unhappy, and I didn't know why.  At first, I thought the problem was that I didn't have a real career.  But I stayed unhappy, even as I became more and more successful, raising the money to start the Children's Museum, and winning awards for radio production.   Finally, I acknowledged that my marriage was making me miserable, but I couldn't decide whether or not to leave.  In late 1985, I started seeing a therapist, and in 1986, I finally realized that I had to leave my emotionally and--increasingly--physically abusive husband.  That same year, not coincidentally, I started to write poetry again after a lapse of 25 years.

Now, in my 60th year, I am the writer I started out to be in 1961 when I
was a teenager with a poem published in a national magazine.  My memoir,
Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life, has just been published by
Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press, and is receiving a lot of
attention from both the literary community and the network of survivors of
domestic abuse and their advocates.  I'm also a poet whose work appears in many literary magazines.  I teach poetry and memoir workshops in elementary schools and adult-education centers.  I speak about my writing and other subjects as a participant on the Speakers Bureau of the Wisconsin Humanities Council.  I've been awarded a number of residencies at writing colonies, including Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain.

My chapbook, Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles, published by Parallel Press, was written while I was Artist-in-Residence at Apostle
Islands National Lakeshore.

When I told my friends, five years ago, that I was taking early retirement
from my radio job, they thought that I'd be free for leisurely lunches and
mid-day bike rides.  In retrospect, I see I should have told them that I was
starting a new career, clearing time for the writing I wanted--indeed,
needed--to do.  But this second career was just beginning to evolve.  I'd
been encouraged by the women in my writing group, by residency programs at Norcroft: A Writing Retreat for Women (in Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior) and Ucross Foundation (in eastern Wyoming), by the publication of an occasional poem.  How could I know that in five years, I'd have produced two published books and completed the draft of a first novel and yet another poetry manuscript?  And who knows where I go from here? Not, I think, to a retirement home!

Scheduled Presentations: http://www.judithstrasser.com/sched.html

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