Be Well Be Here presents our seasonal FREE virtual literary event

Be Brave Book Group

The Healing Power of Storytelling

with Dr. Annie Brewster and Rachel Zimmerman

Wednesday, February 23 at 7:30 pm

Join author and physician Dr. Annie Brewster with celebrated journalist Rachel Zimmerman for an online discussion of their co-created book, The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma, and Loss.

FREE and open to all. Please register for your Zoom link. Be Well Be Here’s initial Be Brave Book Group of 2022 is offered in collaboration with the Concord Free Public Library. Arrive with questions, and Be present for moments of compassion, insight and connection that arise with shared storytelling.  

BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group features celebrated authors who bravely share mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers and the risks taken to craft authentic, powerful narratives.

ABOUT THE HEALING POWER OF STORYTELLING

Reframe your story – and reclaim your life – through the transformative practice of writing and storytelling…
When Harvard-trained physician Dr. Annie Brewster was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001, she realized firsthand that the medical system to which she’d devoted her entire career was failing patients. The experience was dehumanizing. Her doctors weren’t listening. And the confusion, fear, and shame she felt around her diagnosis was preventing her from truly healing, claiming her story, and living her fullest, richest life.

The fact is, doctors can give you a life-changing diagnosis, but they’re not equipped to help you deal with the inner fallout: the confusion, anxiety, trauma, and dread that comes after “I have some bad news.” Here, Dr. Brewster shows how writing your own unique healing story can help you process what comes next–to come to terms, create new ways to thrive, and even reclaim your personal power amid fear, change, and uncertainty.
 
Dr. Brewster and journalist Rachel Zimmerman each share their own personal stories, acting as expert guides as you move forward on your healing journey. With exercises, reflections, writing prompts, and stories from other real patients, Dr. Brewster and Zimmerman show how you can:

   • Process the difficult emotions that come with life-changing diagnosis
   • Move beyond being the hero of your own story to become the author of your own story
   • Craft your narrative and share it in whatever medium speaks to you: music, audio, art, or writing
   • Integrate a traumatic health event into a new and evolving identity
   • Use applied storytelling techniques to strengthen connections between you and your loved ones (and even your care providers)
   • Cultivate resilience to move forward amid uncertainty and fear

- from PenguinRandomHouse.com

About BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group

This online program was established by BWBH founder Lara Wilson along with board members Marjan Kamali and Whitney Scharer to celebrate courageous authors and diverse stories.

The Be Brave Book Group features authors who courageously share mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers exploring the risks taken to craft meaningful personal narratives. Join us to hear the real story-behind-the-story, and Be inspired by storytellers whose words make a difference.

Be Well Be Here presents our summer online literary event

Be Brave Book Group: Grief, Light & Love

Tuesday, August 17 at 7:30 pm

MARYANNE O’HARA

author of Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light

Join author Maryanne O’Hara as she shares the story of her unforgettable journey with her daughter Caitlin, diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 2. What began as a mother’s blog while she faced uncertainty about her daughter’s wellBeing became a literary celebration of life, Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light, which explores what it means to Be human, to grieve and to love.

As Maryanne writes, “Living with chronic uncertainty and fear became a way of life for us. It took its toll, of course, but it also produced some marvelous benefits. Carpe diem. Live in the moment. Cherish what you have while you have it.”

FREE and open to all. Come with questions, and Be present for moments of compassion and wisdom.  

BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group features celebrated authors sharing mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers and the risks taken to craft authentic, meaningful narratives.

Maryanne O’Hara is the author, most recently, of Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light (HarperCollins, 2021). Little Matches is inspired by 9LivesNotes.com, a blog that Maryanne kept while her daughter Caitlin was waiting for a lung transplant. Maryanne and Caitlin’s story has been featured in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, People Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing, has taught creative writing at Emerson College, and was a longtime editor at the literary journal, Ploughshares. She is the author of an award-winning novel, Cascade (Viking/Penguin 2012), many short stories, and is a recipient of literary grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club.

After volunteering as an end-of-life volunteer at care facilities in Boston and Pittsburgh, Maryanne became a certified end-of-life doula at UVM’s Larner College of Medicine in 2019. She lectures on topics including chronic illness, bereavement, and secular spirituality and is the developer of a legacy writing workshop that facilitates personal and communal reflective creative practices across identity, age, and health status.

Caitlin was her only child. Maryanne and her husband Nick live near Boston.

Learn more about Maryanne and Caitlin’s story…

About BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group

This online program was established by BWBH founder Lara Wilson along with board members Marjan Kamali and Whitney Scharer to celebrate courageous authors and diverse stories.

The Be Brave Book Group features authors who courageously share mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers exploring the risks taken to craft meaningful personal narratives. Join us to hear the real story-behind-the-story, and Be inspired by storytellers whose words make a difference.

Be Well Be Here presents our seasonal online literary event :

Be Brave Book Group: Debut Memoirists

BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group features celebrated authors sharing mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers and the risks taken to craft authentic, meaningful narratives.

On Sunday, December 13 at 4:30 pm, we feature the work of memoirists E. Dolores Johnson, author of Say I’m Dead, and Grace Talusan, author ofThe Body Papers. While a portion of the evening will be spent discussing their work, Dolores and Grace will also discuss the pitfalls of writing about personal events, their experiences sharing stories with controversial themes, and how memoir writers stay creative and engaged during times of crisis. Come with your questions and leave inspired!  

Please DONATE to Be Well Be Here to support mindful wellness programming for ALL.

Say I’m Dead, a memoir of secrets, separation and transformation, chronicles four generations who overturned forbidden race-mixing norms amid America’s persistent bigotry. In 1942, Dolores Johnson’s black father and white mother fled Indiana’s Klan and anti-miscegenation laws to legally marry in New York, twenty-four years before the Supreme Court made mixed-race marriage legal.

Dolores was born in Buffalo, NY. She earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business. After a career in tech, she took an MFA equivalent course to learn creative writing. Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism. Johnson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Body Papers, Grace Talusan’s acclaimed memoir-in-essays exploring the immigrant experience, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a Must-Read and winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, a Foreword INDIES Finalist, and winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Grace was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught writing for many years at Tufts University and Grub Street. Currently, Grace is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Join us at the Concord Festival of Authors for the LGBTQ Memoir event with celebrated authors Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and Michelle Bowdler. BWBH founder Lara Wilson emcees this conversation about crafting authentic, unforgettable personal narratives that reveal deep aspects of our humanity.

About the Authors

Michelle Bowdler’s book, Is Rape a Crime?, published in July 2020, has been long-listed for a 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence (Red Press) and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action (McFarland). Her essays: Eventually You Tell Your Kids and Babelogue were both nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Michelle has worked in the public health field for years on issues of addiction, violence prevention, sexual health, HIV education and prevention. She has been involved, as well, for over a decade working on social justice issues related to rape and crimes of violence. Currently, she has the pleasure and honor of working as Executive Director of Health & Wellness at a major university in Boston where her work involves efforts to provide excellent sexual assault prevention and treatment for students in addition to mental health and health care.

Michelle Bowdler is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied and fell in love with literature and writing, and of the Harvard School of Public Health, where she learned that so much of healthcare access and outcomes have a social and cultural component. She is married to a wonderful woman and they have two awesome children.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec 2020, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and has been translated into ten languages.

The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications.

Alex earned their BA at Columbia University, their JD at Harvard Law School, and their MFA at Emerson College. They are now an assistant professor at Bowdoin College and live in Portland, Maine, with an enormous puppy.

Join award-winning author Ron Maclean for the Concord Festival of Authors 2020 Short Story Writing Workshop! All CFA 2020 Writing Workshops sponsored by Be Well Be Here are live through Zoom.

Your First 100 Words:

Grounding Readers in Your Fiction

Most readers will engage with a story if they feel grounded in some aspect of that story’s world. Whether physically grounded in setting, emotionally grounded in character, or logistically grounded in the human situation, it’s crucial to establish for readers early on a world they recognize, and to convey what matters in that world. In this advanced craft seminar, we’ll discuss techniques for grounding your stories, analyze published examples, and provide exercises to help you put it in practice.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28 at 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Space is limited at a discounted rate of $15. Apply for a scholarship here.

Ron MacLean is author of the story collections We Might as Well Light Something On Fire and Why the Long Face? and the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies. MacLean’s fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, Fiction International, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and teaches at GrubStreet in Boston.

Join award-winning author Whitney Scharer for the Concord Festival of Authors 2020 Historical Fiction Writing Workshop online! All CFA 2020 Writing Workshops are sponsored by Be Well Be Here.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21 at 4:00 - 5:30 pm Register for your Zoomline

Turning Fact into Fiction

Historical novels based on real people or real events abound, but incorporating historical events and figures into a narrative can be complicated and confusing. Writers wonder: how much research do I have to do? How can I successfully write about a place and time that feels utterly different from my own life? What are the rules for fictionalizing the life of a real person? The truth is that there’s no one right way to write fiction about the past, but there are tools and guidelines you can use to be comfortable with your choices. In this interactive talk, we’ll discuss the purpose of historical fiction, take a look at some examples of successful projects, discuss research techniques, and more. 

Space is limited at a discounted rate of $15. Apply for a scholarship here.

Whitney Scharer’s first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published or is forthcoming in over a dozen other countries.

Whitney has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale, a St. Botolph Emerging Artists Grant, and a Somerville Arts Council Artists Fellowship. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review. She holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Whitney teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series. For more information, visit WhitneyScharer.com