The September Homewood Stories program has been canceled due to founder Karen O’Donnell’s ongoing fight with cancer, but supporters say the storytelling program will continue.
“Karen’s all about positivity and love. We want to see this go on because it would be a shame to lose it,” said her friend Suzy Dritz who has been a presenter at Homewood Stories and whose husband, Randy, is the sound engineer.
session of Homewood Stories at the Flossmoor Community House.
(Karen Torme Olson photos/H-F Chronicle)
As of three weeks ago, O’Donnell told friends the cancer diagnosis was “a bump in the road” but her brother, Stephen Wright, said his sister is in hospice care. A GoFundMe account has been started to raise funds to cover her medical care.
Donations are coming in from storytellers, fellow dentists and Homewood Stories supporters. The goal is $25,000.
Over the 10 years of Homewood Stories, “Her focus was 110% on her audience and her community. It was not about her,” said Jill Howe, a storyteller and fellow producer. “That was extremely important to Karen to make her audience feel this is about you. She’s making it for them. That is her gift to the community.”
Errol McClendon, Megan Wells, Homewood Stories founder and curator
Karen O’Donnell and Betsey Milord. (Karen Torme Olson/H-F Chronicle)
Telling stories and giving others a platform to tell theirs was O’Donnell’s great joy, Dritz said. O’Donnell brought not just professional storytellers out to shows at the Flossmoor Community House and other locations but people from the South Suburbs who’d never been before an audience. They got their chance to stand on stage and tell a story.
“First-time people who were local, that was so important because it always brought in a new audience. People get hooked and they come back month after month,” Dritz said.
She went to Homewood Stories the first year when it was at Grady’s Snack & Dine. Initially she went to hear a friend tell a story. The friend and Dritz’s husband encouraged her to join the group. When O’Donnell overheard the conversation, she said Dritz could join any time.
“I said I don’t have a story and Karen said ‘Yes you do. You let me know when you want me to put you in the show.’ She badgered me for a month or two, so I wrote a story. Now I have many, and I’m telling stories all over the place. I love it,” Dritz said.
during the first anniversary of Homewood Stories
in January 2015. (Chronicle file photo)
When O’Donnell wanted to get away, the Morton Arboretum was her favorite place, Howe said. “She really loved connecting with nature and it really replenished her.”
“She would call me and say ‘I’m going to the Arb and staying at the Hyatt.’ That would mean Karen was going into her space of positivity, security and peace,” Howe said.
O’Donnell is the fourth child in a family of 11 siblings. Wright said his sister “definitely liked to talk a lot (growing up)” but she didn’t tell stories. He went with her to a Chicago storytelling show. It was the first time she was on the bill, and “she was just a natural at it” and went back numerous times.
Wright jokes about how his sister’s profession as a dentist was the perfect pairing with storytelling, because “being a dentist she has her hands in someone’s mouth so they kind of had to listen to her.”
After so many times performing in Chicago, O’Donnell made friends within the storytelling community.
“She kind of fell into that as a niche,” Wright said, but O’Donnell lamented that there were no shows in the suburbs, so she started Homewood Stories and drew great presenters from her roster of friends within the Chicago storytelling community who complemented local talent.
Dritz said O’Donnell considers Homewood Stories “her great legacy.”
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