by Margaret Bauer, Editor
“Everybody in New York City remembered exactly what they were doing when the planes hit, and how they came to be doing it. Everyone had a story.”
—Liza Wieland, Land of Enchantment
I was with the NCLR student staff members in the hallway outside my office. We were stuffing the 2001 issues into their envelopes, which we had labeled in zip code order when we had a date of delivery from the printer. The boxes of books were stacked in the hall outside my office, and we began laying the six or seven hundred envelopes, in sorted order for bulk mailing, on the floor up and down the hall for filling, sealing, and then bagging. We would carry the bags to the post office upon finishing.
September 11, 2001 would be the last time we saved on the printer’s charge for packaging and mailing the issues for us. Continuing our work while the towers burned and fell, as though anything else mattered at that moment is not a comfortable memory.
In our defense for going on with our work during one of the greatest tragedies of our nation’s history, none of us really understood what was happening. We did not have the news streaming on my computer in the office, as I would on January 6, 2021 (watching alone, as we were still teaching remotely then due to the pandemic). On that later date, I was supposed to be packing up my office so that our department chair could have offices painted and carpets replaced with the travel funds we would not be using that year. I had NPR on while I cleaned out files (might as well clean out while packing up), and when I heard what was happening, I pulled up news on my desktop screen. And packing stopped while I watched the violent mob try to breach the US Capitol to find and presumably murder Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence. Was I watching the end of our democracy? I wondered.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I did at some point wander down to the English office for something we needed – more rubber bands, postal cartons or bags perhaps. In the English department suite, I found the staff and officers listening to the news on a radio. They told me a bit of what had happened – it was still early. I think the first plane had crashed into the tower, and we were thinking it was a small plane, not yet aware it was a commercial plane. I’d return for something else in a bit, and hear more, but it would be evening before I saw the images of the planes flying into the towers, the towers falling, the survivors streaming out, the horror.
I grasped at least the seriousness of what had happened passing through the faculty lounge where one of my colleagues was trying to reach his wife and daughter, who lived in New York. Just as I couldn’t get a radio to work in my cinderblock-walled office, his first-generation cell phone wouldn’t work in his. I returned to my office, and the student staff members said my dad had called to tell me that, though he was in Washington, D.C., he was not near the Pentagon. I had not known he was in D.C. that day, though he did travel there fairly often to lobby for the Louisiana university he worked for. I had not heard yet that there was also an attack on the Pentagon, so, blessedly, I had not thought to wonder if he was in D.C. until I knew, too, that he was safe.
I took a break from issue packaging to teach my class, unsure of what to do. Lesson as usual did not seem appropriate. It was an American literature class, and I decided on the walk over to my classroom in another building that I’d jump over to Whitman. We would just read pieces of Song of Myself: – “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, / . . . / Whoever degrades another degrades me, / And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” The many catalogs within the poem of all the distinct people and places to be found in this country would identify and individualize the myriad of people pouring into the streets of New York on this day, looking for loved ones, figuring out what they could do to help.
After class, I returned to the office – or rather, the hallway outside of it. We finished the packaging. This process took hours; this was my fourth year doing this (and last, as I say). We took the bags to the post office in time for the last pickup. We were just ready to clear the hallways. The faculty on that hall were, I am sure, more than ready for us to clear the way. We had no idea that if we had not finished up that day, the issues could have sat in the post office for days, maybe weeks. The next day, out of caution, the US Post Office Service would stop mail services for a while.
Not that it mattered so much anymore, this new issue of a literary magazine, I would think upon realizing our “luck” that we got it mailed before the postal shutdown.
I went home exhausted and watched the evening news – watched the horror, over and over – realized what had happened was akin to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But we could not yet know how it would change our lives.
Writers and readers have the advantage of developing an understanding of or finding a way to make peace with such tragedies as 9/11: writing and/or reading about it. If it did not seem to affect our own lives, personally, reading other people’s stories allows us to do so in a way that inspires empathy. Creating a story from it, as my friend Liza Wieland did in her novel Land of Enchantment, helps us to process what just happened. Whether we are telling our own story – of loss or just where I was on 9/11 – we seek understanding through writing.
I reached out to Liza while writing this to ask her how she would describe writing 9/11 into Land of Enchantment helped her to process that historic American tragedy as someone who was not there, lost no one in the towers or at the Pentagon. She responded,
When I lived in New York City in the mid-1980s, I had friends who worked in the Twin Towers, and I met them several times in Lower Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, I could imagine the offices, the stairwells, and the lay of the land around the Towers. What I could not come to terms with were the jumpers. These people haunted me. The character of Nancy Diamond in Land of Enchantment was a kind of personal exorcism. Who are you going to become when faced with that choice? Most of us won’t be, thankfully, but still. Who are you going to become? Nancy Diamond is an answer, and also an incantation against such a moment, a kind of prayer.
In Liza’s novel, she describes the people on the pavement below watching the jumpers from the Towers:
“No one screamed. The time for that seemed to have passed or not yet arrived. Instead, Sasha saw round empty eyes and round gaping mouths. These aren’t really people, she thought. We aren’t people. We are something else now, all of us. She stood and pulled her camera out of the bag, flicked the on switch, raised the camera to cover her face. She thought the phrase, I can catch them on film.”
And that is what Liza does, catch them on paper. Each victim – those who died, and those who lost loved ones – had a life that was cut short that day. The writer imagines herself inside their suffering and then brings the reader inside to do the same. That’s what writers do: record and interpret these stories.
Several North Carolina poets, for example, contributed poems for the volume Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 and Its Aftermath, edited by Joseph Bathanti and David Potorti, published by Press 53 in 2021. Sometimes it takes twenty years to process an event. Milestone anniversaries like the twentieth and now the twenty-fifth inspire revisiting, and we have the advantage of distance as we assess whether we’ve learned and evolved since the horrific event. Or are we in danger of forgetting and thus not preparing ourselves against such happening again?
As long as writers tell the stories and readers read the stories, there will be some people who remember, wherever they were on that day.