Terrorism and Trauma: A Journalist’s Life-Changing Choice on 9/11

Recorder of Deeds is my intimate memoir of a former award-winning journalist who navigates by dead reckoning a single day that forever changed the world, nearly wrenched my family apart, threatened every single thing I held dear, and ultimately strengthened the tensile bonds of love.

Between 1999 and 2009, I traveled on assignment to the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi, to a Death Row cellblock in Texas twice, and to a seminary garden. I covered the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, filing dispatches from the chaotic streets near Ground Zero. Both of my parents died, I lost my job, and my sister lost her fragile mind.

The trauma of those years resulted in long-term symptoms of PTSD, but there was much happiness for me and my family as well during those years.

Unfolding in lush narrative and in the flash and flare of real-time emails, Recorder of Deeds will touch the hearts of readers who will see in this memoir elements of their own personal and professional odysseys.

An edited version of my 9/11 odyssey has been accessioned into the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Women in Journalism archives. To request a copy, use the following link:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri/sets/72157627576982096/