Storyteller extraordinaire and local dentist Karen O’Donnell died Monday, Sept. 2, after a battle with cancer.
A memorial mass will be said at 11 a.m. Monday, Sept. 30, at St. John Neumann Church, 17951 Dixie Highway in Homewood.
Dr. O’Donnell recently marked 10 years of Homewood Stories, an open mic monthly storytelling program she initiated. Friends have vowed to keep the program alive, but the format may change.
“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.
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.”
Dr. O’Donnell went to storytelling programs in Chicago. She invited her brother, Stephen Wright, to the show the first time she was on the bill, and “she was just a natural at it” and went back numerous times, he said.
“She kind of fell into that as a niche,” Wright said, but Dr. 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.
Telling stories and giving others a platform to tell theirs was Dr. O’Donnell’s great joy, Dritz said. Dr. 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.
Dr. O’Donnell was one of 11 children of Francis and Mary Wright of Homewood. Her father was a dentist who helped organize the dental hygiene program at Prairie State College. It was there that Dr. O’Donnell trained as a hygienist and practiced for a time before deciding she, too, would become a dentist. Her practice for many years was on Martin Avenue in downtown Homewood.
Donations in her memory can be made to the Dr. Francis Wright Scholarship Fund for the dental hygiene program at PSC through the PSC Foundation, 202 S. Halsted St., Chicago Heights, Illinois 606411 or at [email protected].