Going Off Script with Mary Tribble '82 MA '19 and Ann Phelps: Final Episode

This is it — the final episode of Wake Women.After two years, five seasons, and more than seventy conversations with extraordinary women connected to Wake Forest University, host Mary Tribble hands over the microphone for the last time. Her guest, Ann Phelps — director of programming for Wake Forest's Program for Leadership and Character — flips the script this time and she asks the questions. Ann and Mary have an intimate, wide-ranging conversation about the things that matter most at the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. What do we owe the past? How do we find meaning when we stop measuring our worth by what we produce? What does it look like to tend to the women who come after us? What does it really mean to go off script — not just professionally, but in the deepest sense of who we are becoming?Mary reflects on two years of unexpected lessons: the healing power of writing, the courage it takes to let a landscape change you, the genius of giving, the importance of ritual and ceremony, and the difference between empathy and compassion that turns out to matter more than she knew. She also reads from a personal essay on endings — one that takes on new weight in light of a loss she didn't see coming.