Brandy Dykhuizen watched a world glued to screens, consuming life through filtered feeds. So she built something radically analog: rooms where strangers gather to tell each other true stories out loud.
That impulse became Living Proof Stories, a community storytelling venture she launched with Joe Hudak earlier this year. The concept rests on a simple premise: every person carries thousands of stories, and sharing them face-to-face dissolves the illusion that we have little in common.
Dykhuizen, 44, came to this work after careers in biotech, science writing, and nonprofit communications. She noticed that helping people find their voice energized her more than anything else. Living Proof now offers workshops, ghostwriting, mentorship, community programming, and corporate services, with pricing scaled to what sponsors and organizations can afford.
The flagship offering is a three-hour generative writing workshop called “Start Your Story.” Participants leave with a five-to-10-minute personal narrative outline, sometimes a full first draft. Dykhuizen describes it as “therapy with a small t,” noting that writing about personal experiences often unlocks emotions people had buried. No clinicians involved, just guided reflection and feedback.
Live showcases anchor the work. Upcoming events span Borrego Springs, Oceanside, Alpine, and Encinitas. The Borrego Springs showcase reveals the intentional design behind these gatherings. That community skews older and White at performing arts events, yet the local high school is nearly 90 percent Latino. As a result, organizers reserved nearly half the storytelling slots for students, partnering with OLAX, a Latino nonprofit, to ensure cross-cultural and intergenerational representation.
Dykhuizen’s own origin story echoes the practice she now teaches. Growing up an only child on Topsail Island, North Carolina, she wrote and illustrated tiny books, then staged bedroom showcases for family and neighbors. Today she reads broadly, from feminist criticism to investigative nonfiction about drug trafficking in the Army Special Forces to Karen Russell’s magical realist fiction.
The stakes go beyond entertainment. Dykhuizen wants to engineer moments where vulnerability replaces surface-level chat, where people who assumed they had nothing in common discover shared emotional undercurrents. As digital noise intensifies, face-to-face narrative exchange becomes less a novelty and more a necessity.
