September 11 Archives | Numéro Cinq

Erika Dreifus and her favourite reader

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In keeping with the memories of dark times we share this week, here is a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on writing stories after 9/11. Erika Dreifus casts an intelligently inquiring eye over the issues of politics in writing, political correctness, what used to be called the ethics of appropriation—in general the swirl of thoughts and inhibitions that somehow got in the way of writing about massive public tragedy in America. This essay was written just two years after that sunny September day. One wonders if things have changed, if these concerns still roil the conscience of young writers trying to grapple with the unspeakable or if they have learned to hear Albert Camus’ stern admonition, quoted by Erika below, “to forge themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.”

Erika Dreifus has published stories with connections to 9/11 in The Healing Muse, Midstream, and Mississippi Review Online, among others. Her story collection, Quiet Americans, was published by Last Light Studio in 2011. Erika is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and Fiction Writers Review, and she serves on the editorial advisory board of J Journal: New Writing on Justice. She also publishes her own amazing online writing resource site, Practicing Writing.This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the “Why Write?” Conference held at Columbia University in New York City, 28-29 March 2003. The essay was published originally in Queen’s Quarterly 111/1 (Spring 2004). DG is grateful to Philip Graham for drawing his attention to Erika’s work.

Having previously earned a PhD in Modern French history, I was in my first semester of a low-residency MFA program in creative writing in September 2001. Before I left for work on Tuesday, September 11 (I was teaching at Harvard at the time, and I had a full day of interviewing freshmen interested in my seminar on historical fiction slated), I submitted a new short story for my online workshop (2 other students) and instructor’s review. So fiction-writing will, for me, remain inextricably linked with the events of that day.

I was born in Brooklyn, and although I’d been living in Massachusetts for many years, most of my nearest and dearest were in the metropolitan NYC area that day. The following semester, I found that 9/11 was creeping into several of the stories I was submitting to my workshop. I was shocked by some of the reactions that this work received, and I was flummoxed further by discussions I found elsewhere. I welcomed any and every opportunity to explore all of this. Hence, my interest in calls for papers and conferences, and my need to think through all of these issues in writing.

—Erika Dreifus

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KEEPING SILENT? WRITING FICTION AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

By Erika Dreifus

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I noticed an announcement in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It publicized a forthcoming panel at St Edward ‘s University in Austin, Texas, that would examine “Artistic Response to the September 11th Terrorist Attacks.” The announcement provided contact information. I sent e-mails to St Edward’s University. I could not attend the panel. But I wanted to know more.

I wanted to know more because “artistic response” to crisis in the public sphere – especially literary response to national and global trauma – has long fascinated me. From my undergraduate explorations of the intellectuel engagé to my own current work writing fiction I have not escaped the precedents, predicaments, and larger purposes surrounding “response.”

After September 11, 2001, these issues resonated in theory and practice. Sometimes it has seemed that I’ve spent nearly equal time, since then, writing fiction and arguing about it.

I’ve argued with colleagues and teachers, who objected to even the most carefully crafted allusions to the attacks in my fiction. Most surprising were the comments of one workshop classmate. Responding to one story I’d written six months after September 11, he wrote that while he, a Southerner, probably couldn’t understand “how you Northerners are dealing with [September 11], it really did have an effect on everyone. And personally, I am not ready to read short stories referring to [itl yet.”

After I’d recovered from seeing myself and my subject – rather than the actual work – faulted, I continued reading: “I feel like there should be some sort of grace period before it is ok to use that in fiction. It just doesn’t feel right. Like you’re trying to capitalize on that emotion … “

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Numéro Cinq marks the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center with the publication of this achingly poignant, sweetly human story by Philip Graham. In the year following the 9/11 attacks, Philip, as is his nature, twice traveled from his home in Illinois to New York to work as a volunteer near Ground Zero, in a part of the city that had always been shadowed by those mighty towers. Now there is only a shadow of a shadow, the city skyline permanently characterized by the absent profile, those absent lives. Out of that volunteer experience, this text evolved. Philip is a poet of ordinary life, the heroic quotidian of work, family, relationship and memory that is our common lot, and so his homage to 9/11 is built by the accretion of over-lapping points of view, all leading inexorably to 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when the first jet struck the towers. Naturally, the people he writes about are not thinking about tragedy and death. They are thinking mostly about ordinary problems—and loved ones and beauty. And the last sentence ends without a period, consciousness interrupted by what the reader always knows is coming.

Philip Graham and I have been friends for nearly 20 years. He is also a colleague at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, his latest being The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. In the fall of 2012 Braided Worlds, the second volume of a memoir of Africa (co-written with Alma Gottlieb) will be published by the University of Chicago Press. He is a co-founder of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter and currently serves as the nonfiction editor. He teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. “8:46,” an excerpt from a novella-in-progress, was originally published in 2007 in the Los Angeles Review (issue #4). His continuing series of short essays on the craft of writing can be read at www.philipgraham.net.

8:46

By Philip Graham

7:16 Jian keeps a steady pace along the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, taking in a morning sky that couldn’t be clearer, bluer, and as always she loves how the filigree of the bridge’s cable wires divides the New York skyline into little segments that change as she walks. At this rate, she’ll make it to her office near the top of the South Tower in no time, maybe thirty-five minutes. On a day like today, the views will be glorious.

She can feel the vibrations of the cars cruising along the roadway beneath her and the hum of their passing fills her ears—the bridge seems alive. Jian still can’t get over this route she takes each morning from her one-bedroom walkup to work, because the first time she’d really noticed the World Trade Center was during that party her mother and father had dragged her to, for the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. Nearly twenty years ago.

They had rented a boat with some neighborhood friends for a floating party on the East River, the ideal spot to take in the promised fireworks display, but even so Jian didn’t want to be there. The whole outing was just one half of the same old pattern—one month, a visit to the Buddhist temple on Mott Street; the next, a trip to the Statue of Liberty. After this latest American Family Experience, Jian hoped the following Chinese Family Experience would at least be a Sunday feast of dim sum.

Jian hadn’t cared for the light rocking of the boat or the long long wait for the fireworks. “Hey, give us a smile,” her mother insisted, offering a wide grin as an example. Jian did her best to comply; after all, there was another adopted Chinese girl on the boat, the one with an American name. Stacy. It didn’t matter that Stacy’d been invited to keep Jian company and it didn’t matter that she wore a party dress as goofy as her name—Stacy was okay. Together they’d be able to weather all the grownup talk until the fireworks started, probably a million years from now.

The sun had set but still the light of day lingered, still no fireworks. Then, a silky whoosh, a burst in the sky, and a barrage began that was more impressive than any 4th of July Jian had ever seen: a roaring blaze of colors and patterns like the images of an enormous, angry kaleidoscope, and all of it echoed in the water as if flames floated on the waves. The same reflected patterns lit the windows of the skyscrapers bordering the river, even the twin towers looming behind them, the pinwheel bursts and flares coursing and scattering across those buildings’ glass facades. Finally, yellow-white filaments of fireworks shot from the length of the bridge’s causeway in an arc over the water—the Brooklyn Bridge had suddenly become a remarkable waterfall of light pouring down into the river, and from all the boats around her Jian could hear cries of awe echoing her own.