Senior Writer
United States 🇺🇸

Cynthia-Marie O’Brien

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Bio

I am a writer, editor, and educator who received my BA with High Honors in English Literature and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and my MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. In addition to publishing essays and narrative nonfiction, I have taught writing in the United States and Europe, including at Columbia University and Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. My writing on faith, imagination, and depression from Bellevue Literary Review was included on the notables list in Best American Essays. My interests include concepts of home and cultural inheritance.

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As a Story Terrace writer, Cynthia-Marie O’Brien interviews customers and turns their life stories into books. Get to know our writer better by reading the autobiographical anecdote below!

Reflection

The headache was the worst I’d ever experienced, but I still didn’t want to go to the hospital that Friday night. I had plans with a friend to go to the movies. It was the summer before my senior year of college.

My mom insisted on taking me to the ER with my father. I grumbled in the backseat as the pain stabbed through my skull like a sword.

Inside the ER, the wait was interminable. A young woman with a headache is not high on the list of emergencies. Finally, late at night, I was taken for a cat scan and everything changed. I knew that something serious was wrong, but the fumbling resident wasn’t able to get the words out, clumsily drawing an outline of the brain and muttering about fluid. It was my father who ultimately told me I had a brain tumor.

When I was back at college that fall, I spoke to no one of the emergency surgery I’d had. I looked the same on the outside, but inside I was changing, after my first confrontation with mortality.

I began drafting some anecdotes from the experience and showed them to one of my professors, who encouraged me to tell my own story. From then on, I’ve been interested in the power of reflection to change our lives – and in nonfiction and memoir as forms of this reflection. Prior to this time, I had always written fiction, stories set in distant lands, historical fiction about immigrants, and characters who were anyone but me, thinking I had nothing to say about myself.

In my own life, reflection has shown me my strengths, helped me overcome my weaknesses, and enabled me to focus on what matters the most. It’s by sharing these reflections with others that we help each other understand what it means to be human.

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At StoryTerrace, we believe that every story deserves to be beautifully preserved and shared across generations. Capture your personal or business journey and share your history, experience and wisdom today.

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