Excerpts, talkbacks and Q&A with special guests
providing health and healing education and advocacy.

Wednesday January 20 at 7:30pm

HEALTH STORY COLLABORATIVE
with Dr. Annie Brewster and Storyteller Caroline Wright

Illness can be frightening, isolating, and dis-empowering, but it doesn’t have to be this way. While obviously none of us chooses illness, we can choose how we handle the challenge. Telling our stories allows us to integrate illness into our lives and to incorporate it as part of who we are instead of fighting against it as the enemy.

Watch LIVE Wednesday at 7:30pm

Annie Brewster, founder of the non-profit Health Story Collaborative, is committed to harnessing the healing power of stories and empowering individuals and families facing health challenges. Join her and courageous storyteller, Caroline Wright, who shares what it is like to parent two young children in the face of a life-threatening illness. What questions does Caroline grapple with? How does she care for herself and her children? What lessons has she learned?  Her wisdom transcends illness and parenting and is relevant to all of us as human beings.  

About the Guests

Dr. Annie Brewster

Annie Brewster is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a practicing Internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. She is also a patient, diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2001. She has been collecting and sharing patient stories since 2010. In 2013, she founded Health Story Collaborative, a nonprofit organization committed to empowering patients and their loved ones, building community, strengthening patient-provider connections, and ultimately transforming healthcare through storytelling.

Caroline Wright

Caroline, 35, is a writer and the mother of two sons, ages 5 and 8. She is living with glioblastoma—the most aggressive form of brain cancer—and was given a life expectancy of one year when she was diagnosed in 2017. She used to only write cookbooks but also writes children’s books with her sons in mind, including one called “Lasting Love” about the possibility of her death. Her message: “Whether or not Mommy’s body survives, my love is permanent and will shape them forever.”

ABOUT SOLO ARTS HEAL

Solo performers present real-life, empowering stories. Transformative experiences for audiences. A theater of resilience that celebrates overcoming mental and physical life challenges and offers hope and inspiration. SOLO ARTS HEAL includes excerpts, talkbacks, and Q&A that provide education and advocacy. The collective creative vision? To help communities through educational outreach and the healing power of the Arts. 

About the Hosts

photo by: Craig Lee

Stephanie Weisman founded and has been the Artistic/Executive Director of The Marsh since its inception in 1989. Under her leadership, The Marsh has grown from a one-night-a-week performance series to producing 600-700 shows annually on its four stages. In addition to its developing work performance series, The Marsh’s programs include: artist-in-residencies, after-school and summer workshops for youth both onsite and in 5 SFUSD, and performance development classes, workshops and Performance Initiatives. In 1996 Stephanie spearheaded the drive to successfully buy their 12,000 sq ft facility on Valencia Street in San Francisco. This increased The Marsh’s programs four-fold as well as provided for a stable Bay Area arts organization. In 2010, The Marsh added a second venue in Berkeley. In 2020, Stephanie initiated MarshStream. She is currently at work developing her opera, Aphrodisia, with dancer, Wei Wang.

Gail Schickele champions arts & sciences taking her left and right brain wherever she travels. As an arts manager, consultant, and producer dba SAGE Artists, she convened an ‘Arts Heals’ group of solo artists at APAP 2020 whose unique stories of physical and mental challenges evince the healing power of The Arts.  The COVID lockdown inspired Stephanie Weisman to create SOLO ARTS HEAL to share these outstanding stories of resilience, dramatic and comedic, for the entertainment and benefit of communities everywhere. Gail’s expertise in marketing, management, booking and production has served various theaters, festivals and events nationwide. Trained as a journalist in New York and Colorado, Gail has covered Colorado state politics and the environmental landscape of the Rockies. Environmental science inspires her educational and advocacy work in California with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and for the League of Women Voters for which she’s worked as an administrator and reporter on environmental issues Including legislation, climate science outreach, and co-chair of an environmental speakers series. Gail is honored to host SOLO ARTS HEAL where artists powerful stories offer audiences great performance and ‘informance’ on issues related to health and the environment, inexorably linked.


Back to Solo Arts Heal Homepage