The Turning Edge
By Circe Olson Woessner, Director MAMF
The Turning Edge is an educational collaboration between the Museum of the American Military Family and Battlefield: Home, focusing on military families, traumatic legacies, and generational storytelling.
The collaboration
Anita Sugimura Holsapple, filmmaker and founder of Battlefield: Home–Breaking the Silence and recipient of the SAMHSA Voice Award for Best Documentary Film, and I have launched The Turning Edge. This educational initiative honors and brings attention to the lived experiences of military families across generations. The museum’s commitment to preserving military family history complements Battlefield: Home’s focus on contemporary storytelling, fostering connection, and raising awareness. Anita and I see this partnership as a foundation for ongoing collaboration, based on shared values of preservation, dialogue, and service to military-connected communities.
Why this matters
The Turning Edge explores the often-unspoken realities experienced by veterans, military families, caregivers, and communities affected by trauma, transition, and service. Few programs address military trauma from a familial and intergenerational perspective, and fewer recognize storytelling’s power to foster understanding and strengthen communities. Personal story is important. Storytelling can be curative.
The program
We have developed educational tools to encourage participation in challenging but necessary conversations. These include guided discussions, educational programming, community engagement, and cross-sector collaboration. For workshops, Anita has created a one-hour special edition of Battlefield: Home. This format examines identity, isolation, resilience, caregiving, moral injury, and the lasting human impact of war beyond the battlefield. Drawing from her background as the daughter of a Marine Corps veteran and a Nagasaki atomic bomb survivor, Anita connects personal experience with sociological analysis, emphasizing intergenerational and cross-cultural perspectives.
Who is the program for?
Even though it is based on military experience, our work goes beyond that by bringing individuals, families, and communities together to gain a better understanding of the way trauma affects people’s lives, their relationships, and their sense of belonging. Through film and guided discussion, The Turning Edge turns silence into conversations that promote understanding, compassion, and hope for military and veteran families, as well as those who support them.
Anita shares the program’s philosophy: “We facilitate conversations that transcend a single individual or community by sharing experiences that resonate across families, military organizations, education and healthcare institutions, as well as civilian communities. Our programs help audiences engage difficult realities with greater clarity, creating room for conversations around trauma, transition, caregiving, identity, military family systems, moral injury, PTSD, TBI, and human connection.”
Our logo explained
In Zen art, the enso, or minimalist circle, is drawn with a single or double brushstroke representing enlightenment, strength, elegance, and the void. The open center honors what’s left unsaid and creates space for dialogue, healing, and understanding.
In storytelling, a “turning-edge” plot twist is a moment that shifts the reader’s perspective, making them rethink past events and revise their prior understanding. It can be symbolic, like a storm subsiding or doors bursting open. It can also be an identity change, when someone realizes they are not just one role, like hero, soldier, or victim. A turning edge can also reveal that people who seem like strangers actually have a deep connection.
The Turning Edge stands for what we do. The Turning Edge gives those conversations a continuing public platform. Through storytelling, we look at ourselves and our situations in new ways; silence turns into conversations that foster greater understanding, compassion, movement forward, and hope.
Our stories shape us; our choices change us.
Connect with us
Join us in supporting veterans and military families by hosting a customized in-person or remote screening, workshop, or discussion in your community. For details or to schedule an event, please visit the Battlefield Home website and complete the contact form.
https://www.battlefield-home.com