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Daughters on Writing Their Fathers’ Wars
With Virginia Brackett and Lori Stillman | Moderated by Angela Elam
| 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. | City Chambers
Sharing other people’s stories can be a challenge, particularly when it involves family and topics some would rather not discuss. Hear about two very different approaches to writing memoir from women who reveal their fathers’ stories and how they affected their own lives. Virginia Brackett, daughter of WWII veteran Captain Edmund C. Roberts, wrote In the Company of Patriots to get to know her father, who died while serving in Korea when Virginia was only one year old. Lori Stillman, daughter of Army paratrooper John Stillman, leaped at the opportunity to co-author Jumping from Helicopters with her dad when he was finally ready, after nearly 50 years, to open up about his experiences in Vietnam. Both share insights about their books and the writing process with moderator Angela Elam, the producer of the public radio series, New Letters on the Air, originally from New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Virginia Brackett
Author
Virginia Brackett
Virginia Brackett, PhD helps organize writing workshops for veterans and their families as a member of the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team. She is a board member of the Moral Injury Association and serves on the Great Group Reads committee of the National Women’s Book Association. Brackett’s most recent book, In the Company of Patriots (Sunbury Press, 2019), is a narrative nonfiction study of the effect of the loss of her father to war on her family. Her fiction placed second in the fall 2018 Owl Canyon Hackathon, a competition for which she served as a judge in 2019, and her work was a finalist in the 2019 William Penn Foundation Early Childhood Book Challenge.
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Lori Stillman
Author
Lori Stillman
Lori Stillman started writing her story down in the form of a journal at a young age after discovering her love for books and words. After managing a manufacturing company for 22 years, she reinvented herself as a certified personal trainer. Born in rural Missouri, she is a self-proclaimed tomboy and daddy’s girl. Lori is a wife, fur baby momma, and travel enthusiast. Her passion for hearing people’s stories sparked her interest in having her father tell his own. Together she and her father, John Stillman, co-authored Jumping from Helicopters: A Vietnam Memoir, a vivid and moving memoir that unearths fifty years of repressed memories with stunning accuracy and raw details.
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Angela Elam
Radio Host
Angela Elam
Angela Elam has been fascinated with hearing stories since she was a child in rural South Carolina, listening to the adults around her talk about their struggles with day-to-day life. Add that to her love of reading and writing, it's no wonder she ended up as an English major and in public radio, first training at Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany, and eventually working at WUGA in Athens, Georgia after completing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Georgia. There she collaborated on several projects with the literary journal, The Georgia Review, which served as a precursor to her 25 years of producing the nationally-distributed literary show, New Letters on the Air, for New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she also taught radio production for the Communication Studies Department.
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Featured Titles
by Virginia Brackett and Lori Stillman
