September 2001

It’s customary for us to begin these newsletters with a report on all that Inkberry has achieved in the past month, and then to discuss the great things we have coming up. And I could do that; September has been a busy month for us, we have a reading in just two days, registration is open for our fall classes and we’ve significantly expanded our offerings. But September has not gone the way any of us expected it to go, and I see no way to talk about the month without acknowledging that.

It started well enough. We’ve grown so much in the last few months that we decided it was time to get an actual office. (Up till now, Rachel, Sandy, and I have run Inkberry from our homes, and bartered with other arts organizations for the space in which to teach classes and present readings.) On the morning of September 11, we were meeting in downtown North Adams to look at a potential space. I left home at 9:30 am, and turned on the radio in my car. As I drove, trying to make sense of the news that two airplanes had smashed into the World Trade Center, the first of the towers collapsed. When I met Rachel and Sandy, they had already heard the news from someone passing on the street. We spent the next hour trying to concentrate on business, looking at space and discussing our options, while craning to hear the radio or TV in every shop we passed by.

Twelve days later, where are we? Inkberry has settled on a space, and we’re negotiating a lease. More than six thousand people are dead or missing in New York, hundreds more in Washington. We’ve just come out with our fall calendar. The twin towers are gone. The United States may or may not be at war with an enemy who hasn’t identified itself. In the last twelve days I’ve been in touch with family, friends, even people I haven’t heard from in years, just to make sure everybody’s alive. There is a singer/songwriter in Canada whose e-mail newsletter I subscribe to; she sent out a message last week in which she mentioned a story about St. Francis of Assisi. He was working in his garden, according to the story, when someone asked him what he would do if told the world would end at noon. “I would finish hoeing this row,” he replied. And so right now we’re trying to hoe our rows, in the belief that it matters, that it might matter now more than ever.

Here is what I believe. I believe that life is too short, no matter how it ends. I believe that beauty and wisdom and compassion are among the best things human beings can attain. I believe that that, at its essence, is what literature is for. That is why we come together; that is why we share our stories. Paul Marino and Sandra McDowell will be reading their stories and poems at the Main Street Stage on Tuesday, September 25 at 7:30 pm, and I hope you’ll come and hear them. Inkberry will offer three writing workshops and two book discussion groups this fall, and information about them is available in our calendar or at our website. Please keep writing, and reading, and let us know your thoughts. Our stories are how we make sense of our lives, and I can’t imagine a time when we could need that more than now.

I’d like to end with a poem by W.H. Auden. I’ve spent the last few days looking for a passage from any of my favorite writers that might offer some answers right now, and what I found confirmed something I had long suspected: there are no answers to give, but there is comfort. There is beauty, and wisdom, and compassion. And that will have to be enough.

— Emily