Ten Years Later
[Dana Goodyear teaches non-fiction in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has worked since 1999. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals. Honey and Junk, her collection of poems, was published by W.W. Norton in 2005. A new collection is forthcoming from Norton. In 2010, she co-founded Figment, an online and mobile community for the readers and writers of young-adult fiction.]
I’ve had a wrinkly piece of yellow legal pad tacked to the bulletin board above my desk for a few weeks now: my notes from a conversation I had, courtesy of Granta and PEN West, at Vroman’s, on the tenth anniversary of September 11th. On it, I have written down the titles of a few of my poems, which are covertly 9-11 poems, having been written in that troubled, rug-out-from-under-us year: anxious, jagged, one-sided poems, the poems of being twenty-five and apprehending for the first time how truly wrong things can go. I have also written down the titles of a few books I admire that deal with the aftermath of 9-11: Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation and Eliza Griswold’s Wideawake Field, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission.
I will tell you, it felt weird to be in California on that day, though I am in California, in part, because of it. The other writers I was with—David Ulin, Adam Johnson, Steve Erickson—were all moved to write by 9-11. Ulin, who grew up in New York but left in 1991, described the city’s “new aura of susceptibility” as an opening that let him encounter his old home again. Johnson said he stopped writing a glib novel and, responding to the propaganda that he saw entering American life, started writing about North Korea. Erickson wrote a novel with a scene at the Towers. I was just starting my life as a writer when 9-11 happened, and I have a feeling that something of that calamitous atmosphere and its held breath will hover over whatever I write.
Scribbled all over the bottom of the page are notes of the interesting things the other people on the panel were saying, most of which I can’t make out any more. I can still read very clearly something Steve Erickson said, toward the end of our talk, which I liked, for its vaulting language and its little edge. “Fiction is a collaboration between imagination and experience,” he said. “You’re constantly fine-tuning that conspiracy.”
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| Tags: Adam Johnson, Amy Waldman, Dana Goodyear, David Ulin, Eliza Griswold, Steve Erickson, Timothy Donnelly |
