Core Contents:
Part 1: Brain Health Education (Sofia Garza)
Sophia opened with a brief statistical overview — over 7 million Americans living with Alzheimer's disease and approximately 12 million unpaid caregivers — and noted the persistent gap between public awareness and action: while 3 in 4 Americans acknowledge that lifestyle behaviors matter for brain health, only 46% strongly connect those behaviors to reducing dementia risk.
She introduced key terminology, emphasizing that dementia is an umbrella term (with Alzheimer's as the most common form) and that it is not a normal part of aging. She then walked through the Alzheimer's Association's 10 Healthy Habits for brain health: controlling blood pressure, managing diabetes, regular physical activity, eating right, maintaining a healthy weight, sleeping well, being smoke-free, protecting the head from injury, staying in school and continuing to learn, and challenging the mind. She explained that these habits represent the factors with the strongest current scientific evidence and that healthy habits can make a meaningful difference even for people with a family history of dementia.
Sophia also covered the U.S. POINTER Study's "Brain Health Recipe" — aerobic exercise 4+ times per week (30–35 minutes), strength and flexibility training twice weekly, MIND Diet adherence, regular health monitoring (blood pressure, weight, labs), and brain training exercises 3 times per week for 30 minutes. She closed by pointing to YourBrainWillThankYou.com for Illinois-specific resources, and highlighted the Alzheimer's Association 24/7 Helpline (answered by master's-level clinicians, not automated systems), the TrialMatch clinical research service, and Walk to End Alzheimer's.

Part 2: Writing Workshop (Gail Brandeis)
Gail opened with a personal reflection on her lifelong relationship with writing — from her first poem at age 4 to co-owning a bookstore — and the ways writing has served as self-expression, community connection, and advocacy. She drew a line between inspiration (literally "to breathe in") and the writing act as an exhale: putting oneself back into the world. She also cited research by psychologist James Pennebaker showing that writing about difficult experiences can positively affect physical health markers including white blood cell counts, and noted that meaning-making through writing tends to produce the strongest benefits.

The workshop unfolded in three connected sequences:

Sequence 1 — "I Remember" Sensory Writing: Gail guided participants through five 2-minute timed writing sprints, each focused on a different sense (scent, sound, taste, touch, and sight), using the "I remember..." sentence stem modeled on Joe Brainard's book of the same name. Between sprints, she led brief mindfulness pauses — closing eyes, noticing the senses in the present moment — to help unlock memory. She explained that scent and memory are processed in the same region of the brain (the hippocampus), making sensory writing particularly effective as a memory prompt.
Several participants shared their writing aloud: one evoked a relative's smoking through layered details of ashtrays and ice cubes; another described the smell of gasoline from a childhood gas station and how it connected across decades to an oil painter's love of turpentine; a third described the visual detail of deep purple petunia petals she had just transplanted. One participant shared a deeply moving image: "I remember looking at my mother and her dead body, the whiskers poking out of her chin... thinking she was the most beautiful hag I had ever seen."

Sequence 2 — "Where I'm From" / Spatial Perspective: Gail read Georgia Ella Lyon's poem "Where I'm From" as a model and invited participants to write their own version, either using a loose template (ordinary objects, family names, food, traditions, faith, ancestry) or freely. She then led a spatial perspective exercise, asking participants to mentally return to a childhood room and write in 1-2 minute increments about what was to the right, to the left, behind them, above them, and below them. The final prompt in this sequence was a "lipogram" challenge — describing what was directly ahead without using the letter E — introduced as a brain health exercise in its own right and connected to the tradition of the French Oulipo writers and Georges Perec's novel A Void. Participants shared pieces including a compressed family history written in the "I am from" form.

Sequence 3 — "Dear Brain" Gratitude Letter: The closing exercise invited participants to write a thank-you letter to their own brain. Gail framed it as the inverse of the campaign tagline: instead of "your brain will thank you," participants thanked their brain. One participant's letter, written in part in Arabic, threaded the word shukran ("thank you") throughout and touched on neurodiversity and the unevenness of memory. Gail then opened the floor for Q&A about writing practice, sharing her own experience balancing a bookstore, teaching, and writing, and encouraging participants to define their writing practice on their own terms.

Part 3: Closing / Call to Share (Laurel Curran)
Laurel closed by inviting everyone to submit their writing from the evening to the Illinois Brain Health Project: illinoisbrainhealth@alz.org. She emphasized that submissions should represent the full geographic diversity of Illinois — not just the Chicago area — and that no piece is too small or too informal. A follow-up email was planned for the next day with the recording link and that evening's prompts.