PRESS RELEASE:

“After surviving a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia, English professor Megan Doney was traumatized and adrift. Rather than hardening her heart and life, she wrote Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir. An insightful response to American gun violence and illusions of public and private safety, it’s also about her journey over the past decade toward living with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.”

I thought, initially, that I would craft a map, a cartography of recovery, for teachers who would inevitably come after me. But the journey was more digressive than I anticipated. It took me into realms I had never imagined: American gun culture; suicide and Jungian psychology; ‘aggrieved masculinity;’ religion and violence; activism; epigenetics.

Still, amid all the research on post-traumatic stress, I came across a book about post-traumatic growth—the way that some people experience a richer, more meaningful life after trauma and loss. Yes, you are wounded; yes, you will live.