Healing

The Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative Initiative for Storytelling, Healing, and Cultural Renewal

The second component of the Thomas Wolfe Initiative is Healing. Asheville has a century-long relationship to healing. The city was literally begun because tuberculosis patients came here for the mountain air. Because illness doesn’t care how rich or poor its target, both the Grove Park Inn and the Biltmore Estate are here because of T.B. This is also a place of medicinal healing. The vaccine for T.B. was created here. The mental institution run by Dr. Carroll featured gardening, art, and other holistic treatments. Drive anywhere in town today, and you will pass yoga studios and acupuncture clinics, as well as what appears to be an arm-wrestling match of medical networks both private and non-profit (we prefer the non-profit, for the record).

Asheville leads the nation in the too-long journey to another form of Healing– Reparations. To understand where we stand now (as of June, 2023), listen in on this call with Rob Thomas, the Executive Director of the Racial Justice Coalition. The goal is to gather 5000 signatures for this pledge. In the video below, Rob Thomas discusses why we need to show our support. Racial Justice is the key to healing our communities–and our world. So, when we explore Story as a path to healing, we do not stop at our own personal healing. Not only can we heal with Story–Story then works through us, moving us to heal others. We become a part of the whole of humanity. Another beautiful aspect of story is that its effects are often simultaneous: we heal by healing others. Reparations heal all of us. We can model for the country how.

For more information on how to support Reparations

Thomas Wolfe states very plainly in You Can’t Go Home Again that America must atone for its “collective wound.”

“But it is not only at these outward forms that we must look to find the evidence of a nation’s hurt. We must look as well at the heart of guilt that beats in each of us, for there the cause lies. We must look, and with our own eyes see, the central core of defeat and shame and failure which we have wrought in the lives of even the least of these, our brothers. And why must we look? Because we must probe to the bottom of our collective wound. As men, as Americans, we can no longer cringe away and lie. Are we not all warmed by the same sun, frozen by the same cold, shone on by the same lights of time and terror here in America? Yes, and if we do not look and see it, we shall all be damned together.”

Read more about Thomas Wolfe’s Prophecies