On a personal note…

Identity matters to me, which makes this forward hard to write. Perhaps identity was always going to matter, from the moment my parents named me Brittany (that’s Brit-uh-ney, three syllables rather than two), or from the moment I saw “Hendricks” on the spine of a book (writing runs in my family). But identity became crucial the year I turned eight. Suddenly I was the girl whose mother had cancer.

At this point my life split off in two directions. I discovered that an achieving, determined, and courageous version of myself could face down just about anything if grounded by the presence of a trumpet, and it wasn’t until well into grad school that I bothered to ask what had happened to the rest of me, the part that was playful and imaginative and still fond of horses.

It’s taken all of twenty years since losing my mother to knit those pieces back together into a cohesive whole. I’m sure if you’ve found me you’re here for professional reasons, and I’m proud of my work in a variety of arenas (writing/teaching/performing/contact tracing). But I am most proud of the resilience I’ve learned and the relationships I’ve forged along the way. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you think I can be of assistance to your current situation; thank you for your interest in my life and in my work.