Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic found her lifelong themes in rural South Dakota, where she grew up on a small farm, the youngest of seven children. From earliest childhood, she was alert to the beauties and vagaries of the natural world; she also, however, grappled with a growing impatience to see what was beyond the farm. As a young woman, her drive to break free took her first to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, then travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Greece. Back in the States, she described her experiences in a series for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Her first memoir, Lost Without the River, was published by She Writes Press many years later, in 2019. A longtime resident of Manhattan, Scoblic now lives in a senior independent living facility in Bethesda, Maryland.