🇺🇸 Emily Stagg

Sixth in the country

The 1999 National Spelling Bee produced a champion, Nupur Lala, who took the title on logorrhea, and it produced a film. Blitz's camera crews had spent the preceding months with eight competitors in eight very different American households, and the resulting documentary, released in 2002, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary and took $5.7 million at the box office, a large figure for a film about children spelling.

Stagg was the speller from Connecticut. She finished sixth, going out on clavecin. Her placing put her among the last handful standing in a national field, which is the part of her story most easily lost behind the role the film gave her.

The one the film used to make its argument

Spellbound is, among other things, a film about American class, and Stagg was the case it used at one end of the range. Smithsonian describes her as privileged: a horse-lover whose family employed an au pair, in a documentary that also followed the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants in rural Texas and a girl from working-class Washington.

Stagg's own line about it, quoted in the 2015 piece, is the most honest sentence any of the spellers gives. She did not have half a clue, she says, that the other spellers were not as well positioned for success as she was. That is what advantage actually feels like from the inside at that age, and a film that had merely asserted the point would have been worth less than one that caught a child realising it later.

The champion made the same argument from the other direction. Nupur Lala told Smithsonian that economic privilege, educational background and family dynamics played a big role in who succeeded.

Where Emily is now

Smithsonian caught up with the Spellbound spellers thirteen years after the film's release. Stagg had earned a nursing degree from Yale and was working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner with children at a hospital in Connecticut.

The line of work is worth pausing on. A psychiatric nurse practitioner assesses, diagnoses and treats mental illness, and in a paediatric setting that means sitting with children in the worst weeks of their lives. It is a long way from a stage with a microphone and a pronouncer, and it is one of the least glamorous careers any of the eight chose.

That is the 2015 position. No source consulted for this page records where she has worked since, and this page does not speculate.

What happened to the other seven

The Smithsonian follow-up is unusual among where-are-they-now pieces because the answer is boring in the best way. All of the spellers featured in Spellbound went to college, the magazine reported, and for the most part all built satisfying careers. Nupur Lala, the champion, was by then a medical student at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, after Michigan, a research post at MIT and cancer biology in Texas. Harry Altman, the twitchy jokester of the film, had finished a mathematics PhD at the University of Michigan. Angela Arenivar, whose parents were undocumented immigrants from Mexico, was teaching Spanish and starting a doctorate in Hispanic studies.

There was one exception. Ted Brigham, the quiet speller from rural Missouri, died in 2007 while attending medical school. Smithsonian does not report a cause.

What is documented, and what is not

Firm: Stagg was one of eight spellers followed in Spellbound; she is from Connecticut; she finished sixth at the 1999 National Spelling Bee and was eliminated on clavecin; her family employed an au pair and Smithsonian describes her background as privileged; she earned a nursing degree from Yale and was, in 2015, a psychiatric nurse practitioner working with children at a Connecticut hospital.

Not documented: her birth year and age, her school, her parents' names and occupations, and anything about her life after 2015. A 2006 New York Times opinion piece in which she is said to have questioned the value of the spelling bee is noted in this page's research file but does not appear in the Smithsonian article used here and has not been verified.