Julia Shinnick:
CLASS OF 1965
Shades Valley High SchoolClass of 1965
Birmingham, AL
Julia's Story
My memoir, titled "From the Lion's Mouth," was published in Nov. 2014, under the pseudonym Julia Hoeffler Welton and is available as a paperback and also in Kindle format on amazon.com (ISBN-10: 1502521148 ISBN-13: 978-1502521149). You can find it on the amazon.com page by searching with the words Lion's Mouth Julia. (Look for the dogwood blossom on the cover.) Kirkus Indie Reviews published a review of the book on Dec. 10, 2014, available on the Kirkusreviews.com website. (Search reviews using the words Lion's Mouth.) If you read my book and have any information about Hardin M. Ritchey (Harold Larkin in the book; Hardin Ritchey in real life) and what happened to him or about what happened with Hillcrest Hospital, please email me at the email address inside the front cover of the book. Thanks!
My latest research paper has now been posted on academia.edu and researchgate.net Its title is "Violence in the Thirteenth-Century Trouvère Pastourelle: Musical Evidence for René Girard's Mimetic Theory in Medieval Vernacular Song: An Initial Essay." My hope is to develop this initial study into a book length monograph.
After graduating from The University of Alabama I moved to Texas where I met my husband, Tom. Tom and I have been married for 45 years. Upon moving to Texas, at first I worked as a computer programmer for Texaco, Inc. until I returned to school, earning a master's degree in English (University of Houston), a bachelor's degree in piano performance (Houston Baptist University), a master's degree in piano performance (Sam Houston State University), and a PhD in historical musicology with a specialization in medieval music history (The ...Expand for more
University of Texas at Austin). I retired in 2011 from the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY where I was a member of the faculty in the School of Music.
For 10 years I served as treasurer and a member of the board of COV&R (Colloquium on Violence and Religion), an organization that studies and works to further the "mimetic theory" of the French philosopher René Girard.
In May of 2013 I was diagnosed with an unclassifiable type of "double-hit" non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (with features related to Burkitt's lymphoma) and was in active treatment for 9 months -- locally in Austin and also for several months at MD Anderson in Houston. I underwent an autologous bone marrow (stem cell) transplant on Dec. 30, 2013 and slowly recovered from that, a long process that took over 3 years. In October 2018 the stem cell doctor at MDAnderson congratulated me on another clear PET/CT scan and said that after almost 5 years of clear scans, my type of lymphoma has almost zero percent chance of recurring. No more PET/CTs are needed, although my Austin oncologist will continue yearly blood work to monitor for possible "late effects" of the type of chemotherapy I received. Tom and I are grateful for the excellent care I received over these years at MDAnderson and at Texas Oncology and St. David's South Austin Medical Center in Austin.
Tom and I are settling more fully into the rhythms (or non-rhythms) of retired life in the Texas Hill Country, enjoying the luxury of free time, singing in the choir (Tom is a bass and I sing alto) and serving in other capacities at our church, working in the yard, and in general, just being retired. We feel lucky to be here.
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