With the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the U.S. looming, we can not help but reflect on how the events of that day impacted life in this country and most parts of the world. Our wounds still tender, it would be easy for the nation's anger to be rekindled and or its malaise to fester anew as attention is refocused on that moment in our history. Yet, there have been many responses by writers around the world and particularly American writers that provide a salve for this still raw experience. This may be the perfect time to turn to those calm hopeful voices.
In September 11: American Writers Respond, an anthology edited by William Heyen, Etruscan Press, 2002, one-hundred and twenty-seven writers from diverse cultures within our country examine in one of several genres and a variety of perspective the events of September 11, 2001. Among those included in this anthology are the respected short story author and novelist John Updike, the equally respected writer and New Yorker Erica Jong, storyteller, poet, musician Joy Harjo, whose Oklahoma Muskogee roots and connection with the American Southwest provide a unique voice, and Karen Blomain, a university writing instructor, who has documented the lives of first and second generation families in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania in poetry.
At the debut of the book in late 2002, a year following the events, reviewer Joe Lockard wrote "The difficulty of writing about September 11 will continue to be how we can avoid the simplicities agitprop, and ultra-patriotic banalities of official culture that demean its centrality in the politics of these days. Anthologies like this one are a start towards reclaiming the meanings of the event towards shaping a popular post-September 11 history." September 11: American Writers Respond takes readers across the tapestry of American sub-cultures and forces us to see the impact the tragedy had on people other than the stereo-typical middle-class middle American, both within and without our borders. One of the clearest contributions in this vein is the essay "Sisters", by Karen Blomain.
In Blomain's essay two sisters are spending a morning together shopping in a flea market when news of the attack begins to move through the booths and aisles. What setting is more universal in whatever century, by whatever name, market day, the souk, the bizarre, the mercado, the flea market? The American sisters come to understand the meaning of the tragedy and mourn along with Russian, Korean, Latino, and Middle Eastern people within the flea market. The reader experiences empathy and respect for all cultures and sees, through the pictures painted by the sisters' experience, beyond the events as an American tragedy to the world wide tragedy. As Bruce Bond writes in an essay included in this anthology, "The challenge of all politically charged art is for the authority of the work to reside not merely in the situation, charged as it is by ready-made pathos, but in the quality of spontaneous imaginative participation in that situation." Blomain skillfully helps the reader participate in the events with out the ineffective repetition of the morbid details. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay Sisters.
Karen Blomain, poet, novelist, essayist, educator has used writing to document her reaction to all the expected significant life experience, i.e. birth death, love, discovery, heartbreak, joy. Yet she just as skillfully touches universal topics and international events with the subtle hand of a poet and a life long observer. Her poetry, found in two published volumes, two chapbooks, and numerous anthologies and literary journals, runs the gamut from whimsical verse to deep observation. Most proud of her work with other writers, Blomain holds a MFA from Columbia and has taught in the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania since 1990 and in workshops nationwide and globally. She will conduct a writers' workshop titled Personal Writings: Memoir and Poetry in Santa Fe, New Mexico September 15-17, 2006. For more information visithttp://www.BelleCora.com or call 505/310-0703.
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About the Author
Martie LaCasse is the co-author with Inge Lokos of the WWII memoir, Sitll Life with Violin. She has been a contributing writer and staff editor on several lifestyle magazines in the Southwest. An educator, she has taught writers workshops for adults and designed writing enrichment programs for elementary and secondary students and students with learning differences.
