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Dr. Wendy Johnson with Tessa Hulls

Connection as the Way to Wellness

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Date:
Monday, September 8
Time:
7:30 pm PDT
Cost:
$10 – $35 + Optional Book Add-on
Additional fees may apply. Learn more about our ticketing model here.

Venue

The Wyncote NW Forum
1119 8th Ave (Entrance off Seneca St.)
Seattle, 98101 United States
+ Google Map

Event Format

In-Person, CART

EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.

Book cover of Kinship Medicine by Wendy Johnson, featuring an illustrated red heart-shaped flower held by two brown hands, surrounded by animals, plants, sun, and raindrops. Subtitle reads: “Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves.”
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Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves

Third Place Books

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From left to right: Headshots of Wendy Johnson (with fair skin and wavy grey hair) and Tessa Hulls (with black shoulder-length hair and eyeglasses)
Arts & Culture

Do you live in a way that maximizes your well-being? Chances are, the answer to that question is no. Our modern way of living, some suggest, is incompatible with a thriving lifestyle. While the notion that many factors impact our overall health and wellness is not necessarily far-fetched, you may be surprised by the argument that some of the strongest factors are relational — both with one another and with the earth.

Family Physician and public health professor Dr. Wendy Johnson explores this concept in her newest book, Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves. Johnson asserts that the solution to many of the causal factors of poor health — loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, profit-based healthcare — are about humanity’s interconnectedness to people and planet. Examples in Kinship Medicine include information on how trauma can be passed down for generation and how eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all others. Her work also posits that our relationship to non-human life is essential to our well-being, and community action is stronger than individual efforts.

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With examples from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a doctor, Dr. Johnson advocates for a shift in society that could lead to a healthier future.

Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist and writer who has spent her life advocating for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban health department, and most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe. She has a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. She currently practices family and addiction medicine in rural Northern New Mexico with El Centro Family Health. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.

Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into the backcountry or a research library. Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, received the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Libby Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She’s pivoting her career to fuse her two great loves of creativity and the wilderness by becoming a comics journalist working with field scientists studying ecological resilience and climate change in remote environments, and she would love to hear from you if you want to partner with her on this endeavor.


Presented by Town Hall Seattle.

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