Benjamin Wagner

Wilmington

Emerging
Literature: Creative Nonfiction

By: Gail Obenreder

“The focus of my nearly 30-year career . . . has been on the power of storytelling to connect us, inspire us, and catalyze our individual and collective growth.”

When Benjamin Wagner received the unexpected diagnosis of port-traumatic stress syndrome in 2021, he began to realize its impact not only on his own life but in the “distress all around me.” Recognizing post-traumatic stress as “a mental health crisis so urgent that it prompted a national hotline,” Wagner decided to follow the advice of his hero, Fred Rogers, who always encouraged him to “‘look for helpers.’ Moreover, I decided to be one.”

This was the impetus for Wagner’s forthcoming untitled first-person narrative nonfiction work detailing how his turbulent childhood and subsequent career impacted his personal life and behavior and how he found that “music, filmmaking, and writing paved a path” forward.

Wagner has been writing songs and stories all his life. In high school, he began reporting for both his school paper and his local newspaper. He was born in Iowa City, and raised in Washington DC, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Philadelphia. He attended Syracuse University, earning dual degrees in communications and creative writing, and was a Sulzberger Journalism Fellow at Columbia University.

In New York City, Wagner embarked on a high-power career, writing for Rolling Stone, maintaining a blog about his day-to-day life, joining MTV News, and working for Facebook on their news partnership team. The work was enormously stressful, with the multiple challenges of anxiety producing deadlines and demanding global travel.

excerpt from Learning to Fly: A Practical Guide to Trauma, Transformation & Masculinity

“Kids who were told ‘boys don’t cry,’ grew up to be men who are unable to regulate our emotions. So we pop off, furthering a culture of conflict and escapism. We all need to heal to have a healthier, inclusive and supportive society. THE ALPHA CURE will help readers envision in themselves a new archetype for the American Man, where the best qualities of our shared humanity – love, compassion, empathy, vulnerability, and interdependence – are celebrated as strengths.”

Read more

When he and his wife moved to Delaware in 2019, Wagner continued to commute to Manhattan, but during the COVID pandemic he determined to make the change that led him to begin his current work. He wants to provide something to help readers work toward “a healthier, more just, and equitable world” by providing tactics to “cope better, feel better, and find your own true story”

Across all of his recent work (writing and consulting) is the central question of how our deeply personal stories “shape us, keep us stuck, and move us forward — and how they can be of service to one another’s growth, development, and connection.”

His early influences included writers as diverse as Judy Blume and John Steinbeck and performers as diverse as Bruce Springsteen and TV-icon Fred Rogers. Wagner wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning documentary Mister Rogers & Me (broadcast nationally on PBS) and the forthcoming Friends and Neighbors. In spite of the breadth and success of his career, the Wilmington resident says that his new book provides a new challenge: “deeper, more comprehensive synthesis of skills . . . than I’ve ever applied to a single sustained project, and a higher level of thoughtful, well-contextualized personal revelation.”

The reward for the Wilmington resident, though, to “say truths out loud” and find deep connections through shared experiences. Also an independent musician, he recently released his tenth studio album, Constellations, that musically tracks his journey from the “bustling streets of New York City for the leafy suburbs of Wilmington” searching for (and finding) new purpose.

The Division’s Fellowship is a “vote of confidence from the creative community” that will allow Wagner to support his first-person journalism, affirming both “the value of my project and my role as a responsible steward of its message.”

 

Fellowship Home