Hello! I am so excited to be writing this little introduction note as the new Administrative Assistant and Volunteer Coordinator for Ex Fabula.

My name is Abby Goelzer (she/her), and I am a lifelong Milwaukeean except for the 4 years I lived out west and the 6 months I lived in Northern India. I love Milwaukee and am grateful all of the time, even in the deepest dark frosts of winter, that I get to raise my beautiful little family on the shores of a Great Lake in the same city I grew up in. The only other place I’d like to live is the Northwoods on the shores of Lake Superior, but until life leads me there, Lake Michigan does just fine.

I have always wanted to be in and around stories, declaring at 8 years old, in scraggly pencil print in a journal with a tiny lock that I would be a writer someday. I earned degrees in creative writing and linguistics, chasing any and all academic knowledge on how to use language to create art that lets people imagine new worlds and truths for themselves.

The first part of my career was spent supporting English language learners in telling their own stories in a language that didn’t yet fit who they had been or who they were becoming. We met in those liminal spaces of language and identity and found ways to tell stories authentic to them with words that did not yet feel like home. Being a doula of sorts for students writing papers and telling their stories in a language not their own was beautiful and powerful and frustrating and sometimes felt impossible; feelings that are often the core and heart of storytelling in any language. That tangle of mixed emotions is perhaps what makes telling a story that moves people so rewarding.

After a decade of teaching in university classrooms I transitioned to a career in academic medicine and graduate medical education. I was very good at accreditation requirements and program management, and I deeply missed the beauty and power, frustration and impossibility, that come with a more creative life. I was lucky enough to step away from office life and Teams meetings in 2024 to continue building out the work of my heart: being a grief tender and a death doula through my small business, Garnet and the Moon.

In this work, I support people 1:1 as they navigate their own sacred losses and life changes, including as they move towards their own final threshold of dying, but the bulk of my work in this realm involves writing and facilitation. In addition to the solo-facilitation I do through programming I create with the aim of helping people reclaim their own stories and identity, I work with local artists to co-facilitate workshops where we allow grief to move through us as we move through it by telling stories, building ceramics, or creating traditional folk magic crafts that allow the more than human world to help support us in our grief.

I have also facilitated writing classes around the topics of facing grief and death without fear and Buddhism’s Nine Contemplations of Death. Storytelling is such an important component of metabolizing grief, and it brings me a lot of joy to combine these gifts in an effort to support more people in communing with their grief and learning what it has to tell them as they move from who they once were to who life asks them to become in the aftermath of loss and change.

In my life as a writer, I weave essays and stories about grief and joy and where they intersect and separate and return again to one another throughout our time in this exquisite universe during these wild and weary, beautiful and challenging times. My favorite piece I’ve ever written is called Catalog of Grief. It’s the story of my life with my mom, channeled through me from the universe to the page shortly before the 15th anniversary of her death.

Storytelling is magical when we allow ourselves to receive the gifts others give us through their words and experiences. When the paper airplane of someone else’s story lands in the center of our hearts, it can rearrange the stardust of our cells and allow us a pathway into a new version of ourselves. Our lives and understandings expand, we get to know ourselves better through art, and as such we get to arrive at a deeper knowledge of how to build, where to connect, ways to repair and heal. Storytelling builds new worlds, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have landed in this sweet brave space as the newest storyteller on this beautiful little team. I look forward to all there is to learn before we kick off Season 18 and can’t wait to get to know all of the storytellers and volunteers I have yet to meet.