Books

Pamela Skjolsvik and Tandy Culpepper Talk To Journalist Maggie Downs About Her Memoir Braver Than You Think

Maggie Downs was a thirtysomething newspaper journalist who found herself at an emotional crossroads when a thought struck her: Was she telling other people’s stories at the expense of telling her own?

Added to Downs’s sense of urgency was the fact that her mother was battling Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia which struck her mother at the relatively young age of 60.

Downs’s mother had wanted one day to travel, but that goal was never to be realized. As a result, Downs decided to take a year out of her own life to travel around the world in her mother’s stead. Those travels became the basis of Maggie’s own story, her memoir, Braver Than You Think.

Pamela Skjolsvik and Tandy Culpepper talk to Maggie about her travels and the resulting book in this episode of The Hollywood Beat.

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Published by Tandy Culpepper

I am a veteran broadcast journalist. I was an Army brat before my father retired and moved us to the deep South. I'm talkin' Lower Alabama and Northwest Florida, I graduated from Tate High School and got botha Bachelor's degree and Master's in Teaching English from the University of West Florida, I taught English at Escambia County High School for two years before getting my m's in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Auburn University. Following graduation, I did a 180 degree turn and moved to Birmingham where I began ny broadcasting career at WBIQ, Channel 10. There I was host of a weekly primetime half-hour TV program called Alabama Lifestyles. A year later, I began a stint as a television weathercaster and public affairs host. A year later, I moved to West Palm Beach, Florida and became bureau chief at WPTV, the CBS affiliate. Two years later, I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina where I became co-host of a morng show called AM Carolina. The next year, I moved cross-country and became co-host and story producer at KTVN-TV in Reno, Nevada. I also became the medical reporter for the news department. Three years later, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky and became host and producer of a morning show called today in WAVE Country at WAVE-TV, Channel 3, the NBC affiliate. Following three years there, I moved to Los Angeles and became senior correspondent at the Turner Entertainment Reportn, an internationally-syndicated entertainment entertainment news service owned by CNN. I went back to school afterwards and got an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. Oh, yes. I won a hundred thousand dollars on the 100 Thousand Dollar Pyramid, then hosted by Dick Clark.

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