User:Danna Hobart

Brief Biography

Danna Hobart is an American poet and novelist. She was born October 12, 1966 in Tulare, California.

Danna has been published.

Childhood

She was born Dana Swinney. She added the second "n" to her name professionally, so that people would know it was pronounced with a short and not a long a sound.

For the first eleven years of her life, Danna was raised by her grandparents, Ruth and Boyd Dinehart. When her grandmother became too ill to take care of her, Danna moved in with her mother, Charlene Newkirk, and went from being the only child in the household, to being the middle child, with an older brother and a younger sister. The change was not easy for Danna, or her siblings. Soon, Danna was uprooted from California’s fertile Central Valley, and transplanted in the cold, rocky soil of New York’s Finger Lakes Region, where she would remain for the next twenty years.

Religion

Danna’s mother was then a Jehovah’s Witness, so Danna began attending Bible meetings with her mother and sister five times a week.

One of the peculiarities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at that time was that they openly discouraged higher education, calling it a “worldly” pursuit. The only future they held out to Danna, and the other youth of the church, was to get a part-time job after high school, and spend sixty hours or more a month going door to door, preaching the “good news of God’s Kingdom.” Anybody who disregarded the strict warnings about college would be looked down on, even “marked” as “bad association” by church members. This threat kept most of the youth from even considering going to college.

Danna never felt safe in her faith. She had to be on constant guard so as not to stumble off of the “narrow path.” Because she was taught that Armageddon was immanent, Danna lived in constant fear, and could not even picture a future for herself. Dreams of a life in this “old system of things” brought her tremendous guilt, because she felt she was being unfaithful to belief in God’s “new system.”

School

From 1980 - 1984, Danna attended Penn Yan Academy. Her grades were average, but she was on the chunky side, and did not fit in very well with her classmates. Danna was very depressed. She began to feel boxed in by a religion that would not even allow her to attend her own prom. Jehovah’s Witness elders were constantly urging her to do more and more preaching door to door, and Danna came to feel that she could never do enough. She reached her breaking point in February of 1984, four months before she was to graduate from high school, she ran away from home.

Teen Runaway

Danna felt hopeless, since she didn’t see a future for herself in a “paradise earth.” She had “worldly desires,” such as having a career and a family, and attending an Air Supply concert. She was sure that she would be destroyed at Armageddon for not putting God’s Kingdom first in her heart, and so she spent seven months hitchhiking across the country, running from that fear, looking for answers outwardly instead of from within. Danna’s life was threatened numerous times as she criss-crossed the country. She slipped deeper into depression.

Disassociation

Danna returned home in August of 1984. Since she was not baptized, the Witnesses could not disfellowship her, so she was disassociated for a short time. Disassociation was the same as disfellowshipping. It meant that no member of the congregation could speak to her, except her immediate family and the elders. She was dead in the eyes of the congregation. At this, the lowest point of her life, Danna was abandoned by the people that she thought were her friends, and if she wanted to be reinstated by the congregation, she could not seek close friendship with anybody outside the congregation, so she was isolated and sunk ever deeper into depression.

Eight weeks later, Danna was reinstated into the congregation, and she made up her mind to do her utmost for Jehovah, so she got a part-time job at the K-mart in Geneva, New York, and she spent as much time preaching door to door as she could. She did everything she could to “draw nearer to God.”

Employment

At K-mart, Danna got to know people who accepted her for who she was. She had never experienced that before. For the first time since she had come to live with her mother, Danna felt built up instead of torn down. Danna started accepting invitations to go out to clubs, or movies. One afternoon, when she called her mother to let her know she was going bowling with some girls from work, and her mother forbid it, Danna realized she had to move into her own place, so in the summer of 1989, Danna moved into a studio apartment in Canandaigua NY.

Danna stopped attending meetings at the Kingdom Hall. She took a second part-time job at a grocery store in the same mall as K-mart, and cleaned people’s houses in order to support herself. In what little spare time she had, Danna got together with friends at work or followed Air Supply around the country, getting back stage at every concert she went to. Danna was having the time of her life, but in the back of her mind, she still believed that she would soon die at the hands of God in His divine Armageddon.

Marriage

On August 11, 1989, Danna’s Chevette broke down, leaving her with no way to get to work, so she decided to hitchhike. Little did she know that the brown Buick Skylark that stopped to give her a ride, was being driven by her future husband, Todd Hobart.

Danna and Todd eloped on May 3, 1991. Their first son, Tate William was born on April 21, 1993. Graham Russell (named after the lead singers of Air Supply) followed three years later, on May 13, 1996.

Postpartum Depression

Following Tate’s birth, Danna experienced severe postpartum depression, teetering on the brink of postpartum psychosis. There was actually a moment when Danna believed Tate was the Chucky doll and that he was going to kill her. Fear of possibly harming her child lead Danna to finish her high school education, earning a diploma (not just a GED) from Marcus Whitman High School, in 1994. She then went to trucking school and took a job as a long-haul truck driver. Todd took over as full-time caregiver to Tate while holding down a full-time job of his own. Looking back, Danna feels that becoming a truck driver may have also come from a need to relive her runaway experience from a position of power in order to put it behind her.

College

In May of 1997, Danna, Todd and the children moved from Rushville, NY to Tulare, California, and in the spring of 2000, Danna began attending the College of the Sequoias.

It was at the College of the Sequoias that Danna was finally able to break free from the fear of dying at Armageddon. In a history class, where she learned that people have been preaching the end of time since the beginning of time, and that there have always been signs that seem to point to the The End, but the world has gone on. With that realization, Danna was able to stop living in fear. She began sponging up the higher education that she was told was so wrong for so long.

Danna now lives in Visalia, California where she still attends College of the Sequoias; a perpetual student.

Danna is currently writing her grandmother’s biography.

You can email Danna Hobart at: [email protected]

Television

Danna appeared on an episode of the Salley Jesse Rafeal Show in an episode titled Sweet Revenge that aired November 30, 1994.

The statements made on this page have not been verified or backed up as being factual by a reputable or reliable source.