Imagining health equity through Through Creativity
EPiSODE 1:
From children’s cancer wards to Death Cafés and willow caskets, this episode asks: what if art is our most underrated healthcare system?
This inaugural episode of The Imagine Podcast with host Jenn Grant sits down with elders, authors, and arts-and-health pioneers Dr. John Graham-Pole and Dr. Dorothy Lander.
Together they explore the radical power of everyday creativity. From gardening, humming, and piano as our nervous systems reset to the botanical “Book of Hands,” green burials, willow coffins, and Death Cafés, this episode reimagines how art can help us face illness, aging, and death with more courage and care.
Dr. John Graham-Pole is an emeritus professor of pediatrics, oncology, and palliative care at the University of Florida (UF), where he spent over thirty years as a clinician, researcher, and teacher in childhood cancer care. Educated in the United Kingdom at the University of London, he co-founded UF’s Arts in Medicine program in 1991, one of the first and most influential arts-and-health initiatives of its kind. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the memoir Journeys with a Thousand Heroes: A Child Oncologist’s Story, and has continued writing fiction, poetry, and memoir since retiring. In 2007, he moved to Antigonish, Nova Scotia, after marrying Dorothy Lander, and the couple co-founded HARP Publishing together in 2018.
Dr. Dorothy Lander is a retired professor in the Department of Adult Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where she also served as Manager of Service Operations for 20 years earlier in her career. She holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and continues an active research practice rooted in arts-based methodologies, with a current focus on the healing arts, health equity, women’s history, and the history of the Antigonish Movement. In 2018, Dorothy cofounded HARP Publishing: The People’s Press with her husband, John Graham-Pole, and she is also a botanical artist known for her practice of pressing flowers and leaves into collaborative works of art.
EPiSODE 2:
According to Mohammed Al-Bardawili, love doesn’t disappear under the rubble.
It gets stronger.
From inside Gaza City, amid ongoing genocide, writer Mohammed Al-Bardiwili joins host Jenn Grant to talk about his first short story collection, The Palestine Chronicles. Instead of headlines and casualty counts, Mohammed writes about the small, human details: a grandmother’s orange trees, a father’s struggle to provide for his family, a girl dancing in the rain.
They discuss why Mohammed continues to write through displacement and hunger about the kind of love that becomes even more powerful in times of horror. Jenn reads moving excerpts from his latest book, and Mohammed shares stories of his grandmother’s memories of the Nakba. Both ponder what “never again” truly means—and whom it must include.
From the sounds of rockets to the scent of orange trees—this is Gaza, in Mohammed’s own words.
Mohammed Al-Bardawili is a Palestinian writer from Gaza City, born in 1998. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Al-Azhar University in Gaza and spent more than five years working in digital marketing before the war disrupted his livelihood. During the war, he was displaced from Gaza City to Rafah and later Khan Younis. He is the author of Midnight Thoughts in Gaza, a collection of reflections written between October 2023 and October 2024, and his short fiction—including the stories that form The Palestine Chronicles—has been edited for international audiences with the aim of carrying Gaza’s stories, in his own words, beyond its borders.
