The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun

Ten years ago I was in Athens, OH. I won a dissertation fellowship at Ohio University, and had moved there about a week before 9/11. On that sunny morning I had gone for a run and when I returned to my campus apartment, my sister called from Toronto and frantically told me to turn on the TV. As I watched footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers she kept saying, “It’s over! It’s over! You don’t understand—they’ve already fallen.” I finally hung up and tried to grasp what was happening—what had already happened—in the beloved city I had chosen as my home. I remember feeling very isolated in the weeks following 9/11; I wasn’t teaching, I wasn’t taking classes. I spent most of my days alone in my apartment—writing. Not my dissertation (on depictions of racial violence). I reread The Little Prince and immersed myself in stories for children. By November I was able to write this story, which has been rejected over and over by editors and won’t likely be published now. I think maybe today’s the right day to post it here on the blog. [ETA: I’ve decided to self-publish The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun so I’m taking it down from the blog.]