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Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir
After surviving a school shooting, 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, this memoir is about how to live with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.
This short, literary memoir is a personal response to a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia. Even more so, Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir is a must-read for educators at all levels, for college students, for parents, and for all of us who think deeply and widely about American society.
Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.
Praise:
Megan Doney has written perhaps one of the most important memoirs published since Columbine. Speaking from within the storm of the culture of violence in American gun culture, her voice is one of reason, tenderness, and urgency. -Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of I Would Die If I Were You
This is like no other book I've read--about gun control or anything else. Unexpected, poetic, it gives voice to the mix of fear, rage, shame, and guilty passivity so many Americans feel from a distance about gun violence. Her experience in South Africa presents a clearheaded alternative way of confronting both a brutal history and brutality in the present, contrasted with America's heart of darkness. -Eve Fairbanks, author of The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning, winner of the 2023 PEN John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for Nonfiction.
Megan Doney has written a clear-eyed, devastating indictment of our nation's failure to elevate communal safety above brutal self-interest. With heart-breaking honesty and compassion, she manages to balance despondency and hope alongside stubborn endurance in the face of our nation's tolerance for the intolerable. -Caroline Light, Senior Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University and author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense
This short, literary memoir is a personal response to a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia. Even more so, Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir is a must-read for educators at all levels, for college students, for parents, and for all of us who think deeply and widely about American society.
Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.
Praise:
Megan Doney has written perhaps one of the most important memoirs published since Columbine. Speaking from within the storm of the culture of violence in American gun culture, her voice is one of reason, tenderness, and urgency. -Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of I Would Die If I Were You
This is like no other book I've read--about gun control or anything else. Unexpected, poetic, it gives voice to the mix of fear, rage, shame, and guilty passivity so many Americans feel from a distance about gun violence. Her experience in South Africa presents a clearheaded alternative way of confronting both a brutal history and brutality in the present, contrasted with America's heart of darkness. -Eve Fairbanks, author of The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning, winner of the 2023 PEN John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for Nonfiction.
Megan Doney has written a clear-eyed, devastating indictment of our nation's failure to elevate communal safety above brutal self-interest. With heart-breaking honesty and compassion, she manages to balance despondency and hope alongside stubborn endurance in the face of our nation's tolerance for the intolerable. -Caroline Light, Senior Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University and author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense
180 pages, Paperback
Published October 8, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 29, 2024
This book is beautiful, wrenching, brave, and necessary. Megan Doney is a writer whose words move through you and carry you along on her journey. As a fellow teacher, this memoir should be required reading for all of us who are bracing for the moment when gun violence comes to our schools.
August 12, 2024
I know I’m biased. Megan is my brilliant sister. But this book touched on pain and vulnerability that made me pause, reflect, and think. Her perspective is so needed in our country today and I am grateful for her willingness to share it. Even the really hard, scary parts. Especially those parts. This book will stay with me for a long time.
September 6, 2024
Megan Doney perfectly conveyed every emotion I have ever felt as an American educator. The love of teaching, the grief and trauma she has faced after a shooting at her workplace/college and the rage and anguish she feels over the inability for a country to pass common-sense gun laws are the same emotions I have felt since, the 1990s, and have never read described anywhere else.
May we never lose hope that the people who make laws in our country will have the best interest of all its citizens when passing laws and that in the absence of that they will someday be held accountable for their role and responsibility in the terror they have allowed our children and educators to experience.
May we never lose hope that the people who make laws in our country will have the best interest of all its citizens when passing laws and that in the absence of that they will someday be held accountable for their role and responsibility in the terror they have allowed our children and educators to experience.
October 20, 2024
Megan Doney has written a powerful and moving and frustrating memoir, that reflects on her own personal encounters with guns and gun violence, and expresses her rage and confusion about our nation’s inability to think or act rationally about this issue. Her anger is understandable and contagious, and yet she carries on, seeking peace of mind, even as she devotes herself to doing whatever is possible to be done to turn around this legacy of fear and division and needless death. As a reader, I found this an emotional roller-coaster. Among other things I came away with gratitude and respect for her ability to weave this all together, beautifully.
November 22, 2025
I do not have enough words to describe how I feel after reading this book. Megan doesn't just describe her fear, anger, sadness to the reader. She gives it to us, not to burden us, but so that we may actually feel the weight of it and that we may join her fight. Two things really stood out to me and I had to write them down. "That adults have only rights, not responsibilities" on page 80 didn't just speak to me, it screamed. "As though we are not using the same word at all, as though we are not speaking the same language" on page 150 sums up how I feel about so much in our current landscape. I'm so glad I read this.
December 6, 2025
On April 12, 2013, a teenage boy “having a bad week” shot and wounded two people at New Riv-er Community College, in Christiansburg, VA. With low casualties, and no deaths, the event hard-ly merited the national news. After all, on an April six years before, a young man killed 32 students and teachers and wounded 17 nearby, at Virginia Tech.
This is where Americans are. Each new mass shooting is compared with touchstone names: Col-umbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Uvalde. As if only bigger body counts and freakier details can compel our curiosity. But such violence casts a long shadow on survivors.
Megan Doney’s response to the trauma is Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir. The after-noon of the community college shooting, Doney was teaching an English composition class. Hear-ing the blasts, she ordered her students to run out a side door into a parking lot. Later she heard, in a debriefing for staff, that she could have sent her students into a second shooter’s gunsights. There was no second shooter but what if? If, if, if. Not Republicans’ fault, the NRA’s, immature gun owners’, our troubled society’s. Your fault.
This is where Americans are. Run, hide, fight isn’t enough. You’ll have innocent blood on your hands if, in the chaotic moment, you’re judged to have make a mistake. And if you live, you’ll have plenty of time to dissect your actions. And to contemplate the willful blindness writ large, the nihil-ism, that keeps bringing shooters to the doors of offices and classrooms.
Which explains the anguish, anger, and despair that suffuse Unarmed. Explains why Doney’s spare memoir took eleven years to appear.
What happens to someone who embodies our best stereotypes of teachers—sensitive, empathetic, idealistic—whose world is shattered in this way? Doney carries her psychic wound with every step. She ponders causes and what can be done. But that doesn’t help when there’s been no real effort in a long, long time.
America’s current answer for teachers seems to be, Spare us. Why didn’t you run into the bullets yourself?
This is where Americans are. Each new mass shooting is compared with touchstone names: Col-umbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Uvalde. As if only bigger body counts and freakier details can compel our curiosity. But such violence casts a long shadow on survivors.
Megan Doney’s response to the trauma is Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir. The after-noon of the community college shooting, Doney was teaching an English composition class. Hear-ing the blasts, she ordered her students to run out a side door into a parking lot. Later she heard, in a debriefing for staff, that she could have sent her students into a second shooter’s gunsights. There was no second shooter but what if? If, if, if. Not Republicans’ fault, the NRA’s, immature gun owners’, our troubled society’s. Your fault.
This is where Americans are. Run, hide, fight isn’t enough. You’ll have innocent blood on your hands if, in the chaotic moment, you’re judged to have make a mistake. And if you live, you’ll have plenty of time to dissect your actions. And to contemplate the willful blindness writ large, the nihil-ism, that keeps bringing shooters to the doors of offices and classrooms.
Which explains the anguish, anger, and despair that suffuse Unarmed. Explains why Doney’s spare memoir took eleven years to appear.
What happens to someone who embodies our best stereotypes of teachers—sensitive, empathetic, idealistic—whose world is shattered in this way? Doney carries her psychic wound with every step. She ponders causes and what can be done. But that doesn’t help when there’s been no real effort in a long, long time.
America’s current answer for teachers seems to be, Spare us. Why didn’t you run into the bullets yourself?
October 14, 2024
In this memoir, the author makes a heartfelt, poignant and well-researched plea for the United States to change course from our default acceptance of gun violence. Doney is a professor who experienced first-hand the terror of an active shooter in her building. She weaves a compelling narrative, intertwining her personal struggles in the years after the shooting with data, reflections and analysis of gun violence and culture throughout the United States. The narrative brings a powerful, personal voice to the table, one which no reader will soon forget.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews