About me

Hello, I’m Mary-Brennan.

Stories have shaped me for as long as I can remember, from board books at bedtime, to the heartache I felt for an alien puppet during my first viewing of E.T., to the journal that carried me through the strange years of adolescence.

I studied Creative Writing at university, where I learned to search for the right words and the right emotions to carry a story forward. That same pull toward story brought me to Prague in my early twenties, where I found in Kafka, Havel and Hrabal a particular kind of company.

Story then led me into my first career: twenty years spent helping CEOs and executives find the words for what mattered most. It was meaningful work, until my health asked me to slow down, and in that slowing I found something I hadn’t been looking for.

David Drake’s Narrative Coaching named something I had always sensed, that the stories we tell about ourselves aren’t fixed. They can be retold to fit who we’re becoming. Sitting with someone as a coach and thinking partner, listening without an agenda, helping them find the thread that pulls them forward, this is work I love.

Again and again, I watched women build careers with brilliance and poise in rooms that weren’t always built for them, and I kept wondering what happens when the question changes from what next to who now. That question became Story Advisory.

Somewhere in all of this, I finally wrote the book I had long hesitated to write. My debut novel, Small Heart, Crooked Spine, is complete. It is proof, in its own way, that the work I invite others into is work I have lived myself.