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9/11 Tribute

Only one short year ago many of our lives were changed forever by the horrific events of September 11, 2001. To pay tribute to the tragic losses of that date, we asked four Penguin writers — an economist, a critic, a magazine editor and a poet — to weigh in on their thoughts and feelings about 9/11.
Michael Benedict is the Executive Editor of Maclean's magazine. His newest book On The Battlefields commemorates Canadians' experiences of earlier world conflicts, World War I and World War II, with collections of articles from Maclean's archives.
"I'm normally at work by 8.30 a.m., listening to CBC-TV Newsworld in case something major happens prior to our daily 10 a.m. story meeting. So I learned about the first plane attack shortly after it happened and mentally dismissed it as signficant, but not major. Probably, I thought wrongly, it was a horrific accident along the lines of the Concorde crash in Paris.
When the second plane hit, I knew that something bigger was afoot, but did not imagine anything approaching the reality. By the time we gathered solemnly at 10 a.m., there were wild reports of many more hijacked planes and disasters than actually had occurred. None of us, of course, had encountered such a momentous event. As we discussed how to reflect the enormity of the tragedy — how many pages should we allocate to the story? — we watched a TV monitor in horror as one of the towers crumbled. I suggested we should scrap all of our regular features and sections — letters to the editor, columnists, entertainment, business, etc. — and devote the entire issue, all 54 pages, to Sept. 11th. In our nearly 100 years, Maclean's had never done that before, but that's what we did."
Dr. Sherry Cooper is Chief Economist of BMO Nesbitt Burns. One of the most widely quoted economists in Canada, she is also a bestselling writer and a columnist in the National Post. Sherry's latest book Ride The Wave: Take Control In The Acceleration Age addresses how to withstand today's volatile markets.
"The launch of my latest book, Ride the Wave, began on September 11th. The day started with an interview on Canada AM and then on to CBC's Morning show. I arrived at my office at about 8:30 a.m. Minutes later, the first airplane hit the World Trade Center; then the second plane hit, obliterating any notion that this had just been a terrible accident.
By the time the Pentagon was targeted, we were aware that David Barkley, one of my colleagues on the Nesbitt Burns trading floor, had emailed from a client visit to Cantor Fitzgerald on the 102nd floor of the first tower. He was asking for help. A reporter at Canadian Business magazine was in my office that morning for what was supposed to be an interview about my book. Instead, he wrote about my reaction to 9/11. I was horrified and sickened, but mostly I was numb, disbelieving that this could really have happened.

Over the subsequent eight weeks, I crawled from city to city in the U.S. and Canada to market my book. The security lineups in airports grew longer and longer — 3 hours in Denver, 4 hours in Seattle. The anthrax scare hit; buildings were evacuated in repeated scares in scattered cities across North America. From coast to coast, the topic was always 9/11 and it's implications for the economy and the world.

The world will never be the same again. This is a transforming event, like the Kennedy assassination or the attack on Pearl Harbour. It redefines who we are and how we live. And now, we live with the consequences -- the war on terrorism, security checks and profiling. Never again will Americans be naÏve enough to feel safe. Unfortunately, we will never know if we have won this war. Like a battle against cancer, there is no clear victory unless you die in old age of something else. Terrorism will remain a pall on our psyches, our economies and our financial markets. That is what the stock market is telling us."
A visual arts and architecture critic for The Globe and Mail and a columnist for the National Post, John Bentley Mays is also an acclaimed author. His new book Arrivals: Stories from the History of Ontario, is the latest in Penguin Canada's bestselling provincial history series.
"The commemorations of those who suffered on September 11, 2001 will fall short of the mark if they do not include those less visibly wounded by those terrible events, and the men, women and children across the world whose names we may never know, but who have suffered in the wake of that Tuesday.

We should remember reporters, correspondents, editors and all people whose first duty is to the truth, but who have been forced by media brass to twist the news to fit official U.S. versions of current affairs. We should remember all victims of the intensified culture of revenge and hatred encouraged by America's "war on terrorism," especially our Muslim neighbours who have been attacked and vilified. We should remember the suffering people of Afghanistan, the frightened citizens of Iraq, and all those of every faith caught up in Israel's cycle of torment. Let us remember the immediate victims of September 11, 2001 and the intensely troubled world that has evolved in the year following. The tally of casualties is far from complete, and threatens to grow longer in the months to come."
The author of Cornucopia, Molly Peacock was commissioned by the CBC to write three poems to commemorate 9/11.
On September 9, 2001, I was talking to my husband on the telephone. He was in London, Ontario and I was in New York City. We were having a sad and dreadful conversation about the death of one of his colleagues, and during our whole conversation I was looking out into the night at the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
All my life my aim as both a writer and a person has been to obey my intuitions. That night I had an overwhelmingly eery and desperate feeling. Though I planned to leave late on the 10th, I got up early instead, cancelled my other plans and by noon was heading north. I found a motel about halfway to Toronto and stayed overnight, learning about the attacks on the car radio the next morning and stopping at a rest stop to watch, with a crowd of truckers, the second tower come down.

None of these facts are in the three poems I have written as part of a commission by CBC Radio to commemorate September 11th. My trio of poems, called "The Twin Nature of a Wound" are sonnets about loss — and healing. You don't have to have been in Manhattan looking at the Trade Center to have the attacks on that day resound in your life. They reverberate for anyone who's sustained a loss of any kind, even a child who has lost "a torn stuffed bear" as I say in the opening poem. The ruins (I visited the site last October) have been cleared to leave an astounding pit, prepared for something new. And everyone, in true New York style, has an opinion about what should be there. But my poems are not about that, either. They are about the peculiar, inside-out gift of grief, which only starts to happen about a year after a loss: the restoring nature of emptiness itself. They will be read three times on CBC Radio to commemorate the anniversary of the attacks."