I’ve been at this Thursday blogging thing for more than a decade now, which makes me feel terribly old. I’ve never figured out how to make money off it, though apparently some people do. I probably couldn’t anyway because I rarely share recipes or include bullet points that offer succinct strategies to improve your health or achieve your financial goals. This blog will rarely  promise you better sleep, space-saving hacks, or hot vacation tips. And I assure you, you will never ever read technology advice in this particular corner of the blogosphere.  

While I do harbor a vague hope that readers who stumble across my blog might be curious enough to buy one of my historical novels, I’m in this space primarily because I enjoy it. I enjoy playing with history and interacting with readers and being kind of silly and occasionally toying with an idea that might just turn out to be a little bit profound and spur some good thinking.

One such book. Excellent historical fiction for a middle schooler. Emotionally tough read for those who remember.

But once in a while, Thursday falls on a day when I’m not sure I have any words to offer. This is one of those Thursdays, because of course, twenty-four years ago today, a moment of national tragedy occurred here in the US and altered the way I think about the world. 

And I still don’t want to write about it. I don’t know if someday I will want to. In the past twenty-four years, several authors have ventured to do so, many in nonfiction formats, but also several now who have chosen to let the sad events of September 11, 2001 be the backdrop for fictional stories.

I’ve read a few such novels, and have appreciated them. Last year when I took some time off of writing and worked in a middle school library, I sometimes recommended them, discussed them, and shelved them—in the historical fiction section of the library.

Yes, we debated whether that was appropriate or not. After all, the Historical Novel Society, which seems as though it should be the authority on the genre, defines historical fiction as a story written at least fifty years after the events described or that has been written by someone who was not alive during the events, and so has approached them only via outside research. Their website does, however, also acknowledge that it’s complicated.

Most of the writers of the stories that bump up against the events of the September 11th terrorist attack in New York were alive when it occurred, and are certainly not fifty years removed from the event. Like me, they probably remember where they were when the news of the planes hitting the twin towers broke, and they shared in the shock of a nation that had been generally pretty lucky throughout its relatively short history not to have experienced too much terror on its own soil.

My adult children have no living memory of this event, but for me it’s still pretty raw. National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But the readers in the middle school library have no living memory of that awful day. Their older siblings likely have no living memory of it, either. And so they have no direct emotional connection with which to approach the subject matter. To them, it is just another historical event they learn about in school, like the Kennedy assassination, or the Apollo moon landing, or the attack on Pear Harbor were to me. 

I’m pretty sure I have written in this space, at least tangentially, about all three of those historical events, because even such huge moments in history are fairly easy to plumb for material that’s only vaguely worth writing about—my specialty in this space.

Today, however, is different. It’s a day when ridiculous historical tidbits that might be fun to write about are obscured by this other monstrous moment. And that one moment, at least for me, isn’t quite history yet.