August 18, 2025 • 61 mins
Escaping the horrors of 9/11 on foot, and coming to terms with the experiences through poetry.
First released in September 2021
What happens when tragedy collides with creativity? Andrea Carter Brown's journey from accountant to acclaimed poet was forever altered by the events of September 11, 2001, when she fled her apartment just one block from the World Trade Center.
Growing up in a home without books or art, Andrea never imagined becoming a writer. "I am the first artist in my family ever," she reveals, crediting her mother for nurturing her love of reading despite not being a reader herself. Though poetry spoke to her unhappy teenage self through Emily Dickinson's words, Andrea followed her natural talent with numbers into bookkeeping, building a successful business career that left little room for creative expression.
The turning point came unexpectedly at a New York poetry reading where "the dam broke" and Andrea began writing poems about her experiences in East Germany. But the most profound chapter in her creative journey began on 9/11 when she witnessed the unthinkable. "I knew I had to flee," she recalls, embarking on a 12-hour odyssey through New York and New Jersey while her husband feared she was dead. The trauma of that day – including respiratory disease from toxic dust exposure – created a profound writer's block that took years to overcome.
Fast forward and Andrea has published a number of poetry collections, including one about her experiences of escaping on 9/11, and the effects of that experience on her and her community in the 20 years in between the event and her publishing the collection, entitled September 12.
In this episode Andrea also reads one of the poems from September 12, that she chose specially for us at Creativity Found.
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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet
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Podcast recorded with Riverside and hosted by Buzzsprout
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Andrea Carter Brown (00:00):
The minute I looked out the living room
window, I knew I had to flee,and I saw very, very difficult
(00:20):
things, which still haunt me.
I headed south to flee becauseotherwise I would have had to go
so close to the buildings thatI would have been in danger of
being hit by falling debris,falling bodies.
I heard a gunshot.
(00:42):
I saw a guy murdered.
And I scribbled away.
And for a couple of weeks, Idid nothing.
But let this poetry spill outof me.
How could I have lucked out tohave this charmed fulfillment of
(01:06):
the circle that began when Ifled that morning?
Claire Waite Brown (01:12):
Hi, I'm Claire.
For this podcast, I chat withpeople who have found or
re-found their creativity asadults.
We'll explore their childhoodexperiences of the arts, discuss
how they came to the artisticpractices they now love, and
consider the barriers they mayhave experienced between the
two.
We'll also explore what it isthat people value and gain from
(01:35):
their newfound artisticpursuits, and how their creative
lives in which they'repractical necessarily Andrea
Carter Brown She wrote her firstpoetry in the darkness of a New
(02:05):
York club and in 2001 had toflee her apartment in Battery
Park as the World Trade Centerfell.
Keep listening to hear Andrea'sfascinating stories and hear
her read a poem from hercollection entitled September
12th that she chose speciallyfor us here at Creativity Found.
Hi, Andrea.
(02:26):
How are you?
Hi, Claire.
I'm fine.
Very happy to be with you.
Oh, you're very welcome.
Since the late 1990s, you havebeen a poet and an editor of
poetry.
But let's go back to yourchildhood and discuss whether
writing and creative pursuits ingeneral were important to you
(02:49):
and encouraged in you by thosearound you.
Good question.
Andrea Carter Brown (02:54):
Very thought-provoking.
I am the first artist in myfamily ever, as far as I can
tell.
I grew up in a household whereneither my mother nor my father
were readers.
We had virtually no books inthe house and I would say no
(03:17):
original art whatsoever.
But very early on, my mothertook me to the library and
encouraged me to read.
I remember going and leavingwith the most number of books
they allowed me to check out ata given time, which I remember
(03:39):
was a pile of maybe a foot high,and the next day going back for
a new pile of 10 to 12 books.
So I would say that reading wasmy lifeline as a child.
I had a happy childhood.
(04:00):
I would say.
It wasn't perfect, but it washappy.
But by the time I became ateenager, of course, like all
teenagers, I became a prettymiserable creature.
And that was when I discoveredpoetry.
My mother started giving mebooks every Christmas.
(04:21):
I still have many of them.
One of the earliest was RobertLouis Stevenson's A Child, a
Garden of Verses.
And And then when I was ateenager, she gave me the
complete Emily Dickinson, a poetI came to revere.
I think she speaks to theunhappy adolescent in all of us
(04:44):
and to the unhappy adult in allof us.
So I would say that shefostered my love of poetry.
First, she nurtured the seed ofNeither of us having any idea
of where it would lead.
It was just something thatnourished me.
(05:05):
At the time, I loved poetry somuch.
But I never considered writingit.
Maybe I tried occasionally, butvery quickly became frustrated
because the standards of poetrythat were held up to me to write
(05:28):
by were so rigid and formal.
The whole Shakespearean sonnetrhyme scheme and meter, well,
that was completely impossibleto me.
It basically still is.
I have to confess.
And so I would try to writealong those lines and very
(05:50):
quickly knew that nothing goodwas going to come out of that.
And I aspired, though, to writelike the greats.
And if I could write like thegreats, I wasn't going to try.
I would say I wrote my firstpoem when I was in my mid-30s.
(06:13):
And we can get back to how thathappened.
In college, I studied French.
I studied French literature andlanguage.
I did my master's in Paris andconsidered moving there
permanently.
But eventually, I decided thatAmerica was where my roots were,
(06:38):
and I had to reconnect withthem.
So I came back here, and Icontinued working on my PhD in
French.
But Right at the end of it,when I was getting ready to
write my dissertation and defendit, I had done all of the
coursework.
I had taken my orals.
Really, I woke up one daysaying to myself, what are you
(07:02):
doing?
This is preparing you to teachFrench, teach college.
I had had offers anddepartments were interested.
I swore I would never be ateacher.
But here I had a wholeeducation which prepared me to
do that.
And I walked away.
(07:23):
So strong was my aversion tobecoming a teacher.
This university had given mefellowships, and they had
invested a lot of money in me,and I felt quite guilty for a
long time that I had not donewhat I thought they wanted me to
(07:44):
do with my French studies.
And that haunted me for a longtime.
But I had to make a living.
And I had been working inbusiness part-time to supplement
the money that the universitygave me because it wasn't really
enough to live off of.
(08:06):
And I was a bookkeeper.
How did I become a bookkeeper?
My two aunts were bookkeepersand my father taught math.
And I had always liked numbersand been good in what is now, I
now understand it's not math,but arithmetic.
(08:26):
But anyway, and I put a lot ofnumbers in my poems.
I still love them.
And I sort of slid into thiscareer as a businesswoman and
left the French behind.
And I did that for a while,basically through my 20s into my
early 30s.
And then I had this otherwake-up call when I was working
(08:56):
very long hours.
It was...
a very demanding job that I hadat the time.
And there wasn't time foranything else.
I remember I took a two-weekvacation to England.
And when I came back, my bosssaid to me, well, you know you
(09:16):
can't take two weeks together.
We can't have you away for twoweeks together.
I thought, why give me thevacation?
I had three weeks vacation.
I wasn't even taking all of it.
I mean, I understood, but Ididn't want to live like that.
And the form that epiphany tookwas, I want to write a book.
Claire Waite Brown (09:41):
So do you think that was perhaps an
ultimatum to something that wasmaybe already formulating in
your brain to go back to writingor maybe feeling disillusioned?
satisfied with the accountancy.
And then that was like thecamel that broke the, no, the
(10:01):
straw that broke the camel'sback.
Andrea Carter Brown (10:04):
You know, I think you're probably right,
but it was on such asubconscious level that I was
not aware of it myself becausewhen I was studying French and
The French literature that Iloved the most and that I wrote
all of my biggest papers aboutwas French poetry.
And what do you do with that?
(10:28):
I mean, I wasn't going to writein French.
All I could do with that waswrite about poetry that other
people had written.
And I didn't want to do thateither.
Yeah.
So...
I do think that there were alot of threads sort of coming
(10:48):
together.
But the reason I mentioned thatI came from a family with no
books that didn't read, I mean,actually, all of us had Bibles.
My mother was quite religious.
And I think that not having anyart in my family history means
(11:14):
that it did not occur to me tobe an artist.
There were no models for it.
And my parents had no way ofnurturing that other than my
mother nurturing my reading.
I remember the first time Ishowed my father a poem I had
written.
It was a rhymed poem inquatrains.
(11:37):
It had been published in a bookand it had won a little prize.
So I thought, okay, it has theimprimatur of someone else
deciding that this was aworthwhile poem to publish now I
can show it to my father and heasked me to read it I read it
he said But it doesn't rhymebecause I was using the kind of
(12:02):
rhymes that we use these days,which are slant rhymes and off
rhymes.
And it wasn't that Hallmarkcard kind of hard rhyme.
Part of my path, and I thinkit's why it took me so long to
get to it, is that I've beeninventing my own wheel.
(12:23):
Nowadays, there are so manywriters that come out of writing
programs.
There were very, very few ofthem when I was in college.
I think the first programs inthis country got started in the
70s.
(12:43):
Well, I was finished with, I'mgiving myself away here, but I
had finished my education prettymuch by then.
And the same thing, I'm goingto detour a little bit, applies
to my editorial career, which Icame to after I came to poetry.
But the minute I started doingediting, I thought to myself,
(13:07):
Why didn't it occur to me tobecome an editor?
I came out of college with adegree in literature, with a
graduate degree in literature.
It would have been unnatural.
Well, I didn't even know thatsuch a path was possible.
I
Claire Waite Brown (13:25):
think
Andrea Carter Brown (13:25):
a lot of people slip into what their
families have done.
And And to the extent that theyhave a talent that that
fulfills, in the case ofaccounting for me, I've
maintained my love of numbersand I've found an expression for
(13:47):
it in my writing.
But doing the books for otherpeople's businesses per se, was
just as bad as writing aboutwhat other people wrote.
Claire Waite Brown (14:01):
Yeah,
Andrea Carter Brown (14:02):
yeah.
So I'm a late bloomer.
You've got a late bloomer onyour podcast.
Claire Waite Brown (14:08):
We love them.
We like them very much.
But I know what you mean.
It's not the first time thatit's come up that it never
occurred to me that doing such athing was a thing you could do.
You know, artists, authors,editors, that certainly has come
up a few times so you said yougot fed up right you go and go
(14:33):
right I've had enough now ofdoing the accountancy what does
then that actually physicallylogistically mean you then do or
did like the next day the
Andrea Carter Brown (14:47):
next day um I started going to the Lincoln
Center Performing Arts Library.
I was living in New York at thetime because there was a 19th
century pianist, Clara Schumann.
I knew about her.
(15:09):
My husband plays the piano.
He plays Robert Schumann.
He plays Beethoven.
He plays Brahms.
And if you know anything aboutRobert Schumann and Johannes
Brahms, you've heard of ClaraSchumann.
But I think she stuck in mymind because going back to
(15:31):
childhood, if I could have beenanything, I would have been a
pianist.
I loved music.
In retrospect, I don't think Ihave the talent.
I mean, I don't have the mindfor it, but I was born with a
minor birth defect, whichprevents me from playing the
(15:55):
piano.
And I don't have the full useof one of my hands.
But it didn't prevent me fromsitting at my aunt's piano and
trying to play the piano hoursand hours and hours until her
husband, my uncle, begged her totell me to take a break.
(16:17):
And so the idea of writing abook, of exploring this woman's
life, fascinated me.
As it turns out, reading abouther struggles, her own
struggles, to become asuccessful artist and to balance
(16:40):
her art needs with her domesticlife has served as an
inspiration to me ever since.
I went to the library.
I said to my husband, I'm goingto write a biography of Clara
Schumann.
What can I say?
(17:00):
Was that pie in the sky orwhat?
I had never written a poem.
I Clara Schumann spoke andwrote in German.
All of her archival materialwas then in East Germany.
I had to learn German.
(17:22):
I had to study how to readmusic.
I took a little crash course inmusic history, and I read
everything that I could read.
And I worked on this book forprobably four years.
I had inherited a modest giftfrom a friend of a family, which
(17:47):
I had never spent.
I didn't know why I held on toit.
But again, it was there for meto use.
I did a research trip for fivemonths in Germany and East
Germany.
And then I came back and I...
I worked on the book until Igot to a section of her story
(18:11):
which I could not emotionallyhandle.
And I hit writer's block.
And that part of the story,since I can see from the
expression on your face.
After she was widowed as a37-year-old woman with seven
(18:37):
children, rather than raise themherself, she sent them out to
foster homes.
usually separately.
A couple of them stayedtogether.
So she could go back andperform.
She traveled all over Europe.
She played for Queen Victoria.
(18:58):
She was a the diva of the pianoworld at this time, I felt
judgmental of her for makingthat choice.
If you're writing a biography,you fall in love with your
subject.
You try to see your subjectwarts and all because that's
your responsibility.
(19:18):
But if you don't love yoursubject, you can't really write
the book.
And when I became judgmental ofher, I lost my love of her.
This chapter about her life, Imust have rewritten the opening
(19:39):
paragraph for months on end.
Yeah.
And eventually, the inheritancegave out.
So I went back to workpart-time as a freelance
accountant.
That set the stage for what Idid next.
Claire Waite Brown (20:00):
Yeah, so that's a lot of work and a lot
of time and a lot of emotionalas well as physical energy being
put into that, which then, asyou've explained, abruptly came
to a stop and couldn't go anyfurther, which is fascinating.
How did you then start writingpoetry?
(20:22):
How long was it until you gotwork published?
How did that all kind of moveon?
Andrea Carter Brown (20:30):
So from this position of writer's block
on this gargantuan project, afriend knew how frustrated I
was, and I didn't know what todo.
She took me to a poetryreading.
She was going to themregularly.
I wasn't.
I didn't even know theyexisted, to tell you the truth.
(20:51):
It was so far out of my realm.
But she went to the Mondaynight series at the 92nd Street
Y in New York City, which isprobably the most famous reading
series in the U.S.
And I had never heard of theperson who was reading.
Her name was Mary Jo Salter.
(21:15):
She was reading from her firstcollection of poetry, which was
called Henry Purcell in Japan.
I want to interject that MaryJo has gone on to have an
illustrious, wonderful career,and she's still writing.
And while she was reading thesepoems, the dam broke.
(21:36):
I'm sitting there in the dark.
I'm hearing her write what shewrote about living in Japan.
It was her immersion in aforeign culture.
And my experiences doingresearch on Clara Schumann in
(21:56):
East Germany swelled up in me.
And I found a scrap of paperand I scribbled away.
this, poetry spill out of me.
I must have written a poem aday.
(22:17):
First poems I ever wrote.
I still have them.
Almost immediately, I knew thatthis was what I wanted to do
and what I was meant to do.
That work has largely neverbeen published, although it will
(22:37):
be in my next book, because thepeople and the experiences that
it was about in East Germanyhad told me that it was
dangerous to them if I wroteabout them, stayed in touch with
them.
So I had this incrediblyintense, almost existential
(22:59):
experience of being there bymyself in this world.
very grubby industrial EastGerman city, which is
coincidentally where thearchives were, and meeting these
fabulous people who were tryingto support themselves as
artists.
(23:20):
in a repressive politicalregime, what were they doing?
They were in a puppet theater.
So you could say things in EastGermany, if you did them with
puppets, carefully, that youcould not say as me speaking to
you or in your own voice.
And believe me, at that time,that was the only cultural thing
(23:45):
to do in this whole littlecity.
So I wrote those poems.
It made me happy to write them,even if I couldn't share them
with the people who had inspiredthem.
And very quickly, I said, Ineed to do what I can do to
(24:06):
become a better writer.
So I started taking workshops.
In New York, there's a lot ofthem.
I studied with a for about fouryears.
(24:26):
So this brings us up to likelate 80s, 90.
And in one of those workshops,the last poem that I wrote won a
little prize.
And my teacher, his name wasNicholas Christopher, who had
really busted me the whole time.
(24:48):
I studied with him for a year.
I thought every time I wouldcome home from the class, I
would open the door to theapartment, come in, close the
door, and burst into tears.
And my husband started worryingthat I was like a masochist.
But he was such a toughteacher.
But I wanted to please him.
(25:08):
And on this poem, he wrote, nowthis is a poem.
Wow.
And that was enough to buoy meon to the next level.
Claire Waite Brown (25:24):
Yeah.
Andrea Carter Brown (25:26):
And from that period, my work began to be
published in Some of them verygood journals.
It was the very beginning ofthat period that the poem that I
read from my father dates.
Claire Waite Brown (25:43):
Yeah.
Andrea Carter Brown (25:44):
So...
Learning how to live with thenumber of rejections you get
from sending your work out is anacquired skill, and not
everybody has it.
And there are people I've knownover the years who could write
beautifully, but who justcouldn't stomach the sort of
(26:06):
constantly putting yourself outthere and not getting accepted.
case, there was enough positivereinforcement through this
period, and it increased until Ihad a small collection of poems
(26:31):
published called a chapbook,which won a little prize.
And then I I had a full-lengthcollection, which made the
rounds again.
You get rejected for theindividual poems, but you also
get rejected for thecollections.
You keep reworking the poems.
(26:53):
Even when they've beenpublished, you never finish,
really.
Anyway, that full-lengthcollection got accepted and was
published in 2006.
By then, 9-11 had happened.
Claire Waite Brown (27:16):
Yes, because I want to talk to you about
your book, September 12th, whichwasn't published until 2021.
Yes.
And it's about your experienceduring 9-11.
So can you tell me about yourexperience and maybe why you
(27:41):
chose to, or maybe it wasn't aconscious choice, to wait until
2021 to publish that collection?
Oh,
Andrea Carter Brown (27:51):
boy.
Okay.
Well...
9-11 changed my life inabsolutely every way.
As I write about in the book,we lived in an apartment which
was a block as the crow fliesfrom the World Trade Center.
And we had lived there since1987.
That part of New York is calledBattery Park City.
(28:14):
We lived on this sliver oflandfill which had been then
developed between theskyscrapers in lower Manhattan
and the Hudson River.
It was a pretty magical place.
It still is.
So the morning of 9-11, I wasin my apartment getting ready to
go to one of my accountingclients because I was still
(28:36):
part-time an accountant.
And I didn't hear anything.
I didn't know anything washappening.
until my sister called me.
Having seen the footage on GoodMorning America of the first
plane going into the NorthTower, she knew how close I was.
(28:58):
And her first word, she didn'teven say hello.
She said, are you okay?
And of course, I was okay.
But The minute I looked out theliving room window, I knew I
had to flee.
(29:20):
And I saw very, very difficultthings, which still haunt me.
And it took me a hundred milesand...
12 hours to reach my husband inWestchester, where he was
(29:48):
coincidentally on a businessmeeting.
He thought I was dead for thethree hours that I couldn't
reach him because cell phoneswere down.
And everything I did that daywas to survive.
But I kept my eyes open, and Iwatched, and I saw, and I wanted
(30:17):
to record what I had seen.
I headed south to flee, becauseotherwise I would have had to
go so close to the buildingsthat I would have been in danger
of being hit by falling debris,falling bodies.
So anywhere else seemed likethe best way to go.
(30:43):
And the only other way wassouth.
I ended up on Staten Island.
From Staten Island withstrangers, I went through New
Jersey, up across the Tappan ZeeBridge into Westchester.
Over the course of that day, Imet wonderful people.
(31:05):
I saw more horrible things.
And I thought, this is part ofthe historical record.
I want to record this so thatthe story of 9-11 is fleshed out
in human terms.
(31:26):
For example, I was taken intothe house of a complete
stranger, a woman on StatenIsland as a sort of way station.
And she took in 50 people.
Well, when I was in that house,which is now crammed with
people who had fled, I lookedaround and it was a microcosm of
(31:53):
New York.
All races, tourists, youngpeople, old people, you were
sort of throwing yourself on themercy of strangers.
Will you take me to the bridge?
And as we were doing that, wecame to a very poor area of
(32:14):
Staten Island.
And there were people millingaround.
All over, there were peoplemilling around.
No one knew what to do.
They were watching TVs.
This place had a bettingparlor.
And the TV, of course, wasn'tshowing races.
It was showing the televisioncoverage.
As we were sort of askingstrangers, I heard a gunshot.
(32:40):
I saw a guy murdered.
He was about maybe 100 feetaway, Max.
I saw the police come, pull ablanket up over him, put him in
the back of the hearse, theambulance.
(33:03):
They perfunctorily interviewedthe people which were hanging
around.
They didn't arrest anybody.
But there were more importantthings to do than worry about
one little murder on StatenIsland.
But, you know, I had neverexperienced that.
(33:27):
I mean, I've had a lucky life,Claire.
What can I say?
And even, I want to say about9-11.
I'm filled with gratitude forall of the things and the people
who helped me survive, endure,get this book written.
And...
(33:48):
You know, the day wasn't theend of the story, of course, for
those of us especially.
Well, of course, it wasn't theend of the story for people who
lost loved ones that day.
And they are still struggling.
You know, everybody respondsdifferently to tragedy.
(34:12):
Some people have the ability tosort of wall it off and go on
with their lives.
Other people are, it becomesthe defining moment of their
lives, and they cannot move on.
And then I would put myselfsomewhere in the middle there.
(34:35):
That's the short version of whyit took 20 years to get this
collection of poetry published.
I didn't start writing it for acouple of years.
Unlike many other artists whowere confronted with that
experience, I did notimmediately sit down and write
(34:58):
about it.
This was my second case ofwriter's block.
And I mean, this was acompletely different kind of
writer's block because, and Ithink the poem that I'm going to
read for you is about this.
So I won't describe it becausethe opening of the poem talks a
little bit about that.
But once I started writing,about a year and a half later, I
(35:25):
would say, to be completelyaccurate, to bear witness as
accurately as possible requiredmy being willing to go
emotionally to the experiences.
And I'm one of the people whohas post-9-11 respiratory
(35:49):
disease because of exposure tothe dust.
It's under control.
It took a long time to get itunder control.
But during this period, we hadnot yet found...
Actually, the doctors didn'teven really know what it was.
They tried all the traditionalthings, and it wasn't recognized
(36:09):
as a particular kind of asthma,a particular kind of pulmonary
disease.
Every time I started writingthis material...
after about five or six hours,I would start having the illness
would come back.
And so I would be literallysick in the same way.
(36:35):
And What can you do?
You have to respect that.
It's your body telling yousomething.
But I had to learn to live withit if I wanted to get this book
done.
So the account of that day tookme probably a couple of years
(37:00):
to write.
That's the title sequence of mybook called September 12th.
It was originally written assonnets, as interconnected
sonnets, going back to thoseadolescent fears I had.
Not end rhymed, but they feltlike sonnets.
(37:23):
And the last line of...
One sonnet would become thefirst line of the next sonnet,
which is a sort of wonderfulnarrative bridge.
And for a long time, I thought,well, this is the perfect form
for this material, because itsort of divides it into a
manageable...
(37:45):
chunks.
You know, I recognized rightaway I had trouble reading it.
I knew readers were going tohave trouble reading it.
I had trouble writing it.
So I felt an obligation if Iwanted them to read it to make
it manageable.
But then during that time, lifewent on.
(38:07):
For me, the life that went onwas a life which for a while was
was dominated by the aftermathissues.
Our apartment was contaminated.
Maybe the apartment buildingsweren't destroyed, but all of
(38:28):
the businesses were shut.
All of the transportation wasshut.
The traffic was of the dumptrucks and the workers on the
site coming and going to getinto our apartment complex to...
have the air tested, have itindustrially cleaned, have FEMA
(38:53):
come in, have the Red Cross comein, have the insurance adjuster
come in.
We had to go through a washingfence that people coming onto
the site and leaving the sitehad to go through.
So much has happened in theworld that's so painful ever
since.
And so we're sort of used towartime scenes of devastation
(39:18):
and death.
But for those of us living inthe States then, this was really
our first direct experience ofit.
So the book grew.
I didn't only want to be a bookabout my experiences bearing
(39:40):
witness to that day, but Iwanted to tell the story of what
it was like to go on with yourlife under these circumstances.
Sometime during that earlyaftermath, I learned that the
small suburban town in NewJersey, where I was born and
(40:02):
grew up, it's called Glenrock,New Jersey, lost 11 people that
morning.
It was a town of about 7,000people.
A mile in diameter.
Everyone knew everyone else,directly or indirectly.
And when I learned about thosepeople, it opened up to me.
(40:29):
to the kind of wider grief thatwe were all numb at the time.
We were just like automatonsdoing whatever was absolutely
necessary in figuring out how todo it.
And we were surrounded bypeople trying to find loved ones
(40:52):
who had disappeared, thecoroner identifying body parts.
When When they started removingdebris from the site, they
would load it onto dump trucks,and the dump trucks would go up
to the closest docks.
(41:13):
where barges could be moored,which was just north of Battery
Park City.
It's an area which I walkthrough all the time.
And they would dump the debris,the girders and all of the mess
on these barges.
They would hose it down becausethey knew by then that the dust
(41:38):
was toxic.
They would put a screen over itand then tugs.
would haul those barges downthe Hudson River to the landfill
on Staten Island where theydeposited it.
So on one side of our apartmentwas Ground Zero, the site.
(41:58):
And on the river side was aprocession of these barges.
Anyway, I tried to finish thebook for the 10th anniversary.
And I had a version of it.
And I don't think the writingwas quite there yet, but I
(42:25):
thought it was.
I thought it was.
I tried to place it.
I sent it all over the place,and nobody wanted it.
There is an aspect, too, tonobody wanting it, was that we,
as a culture, We're trying tomove on.
(42:46):
We had blinkers on.
It's a survival mechanism, butit's also one of the things that
I'm going to detour a littlebit that I've discovered since
this book came out is thatpeople here are hungry to tell
(43:13):
their stories about it.
where I was, how I learned, whoI knew, and every time I do
readings.
Strangers come up to me andthey share these very intimate
details, and they're so happy tobe able to share them with What
(43:39):
I think I've discovered is thatwe never shared it.
We lived through it, but wedidn't tell our stories.
And storytelling is, I think,necessary for healing.
Not everybody would agree withthat, but telling stories is
(44:05):
fundamental to being human.
It's what we do that otherconscious animals don't do.
When that process is cut shortor frustrated, the material
stays inside of you, but itfeels like unresolved material
Claire Waite Brown (44:30):
in a way then you you have and you had
beforehand a means to get thatout what do you think is What do
you feel for other people thatmaybe don't have that?
(44:54):
How can they help themselves?
Andrea Carter Brown (44:59):
Whenever I talk about it, I tell people to
keep a record of their thoughts.
On your cell phone, orally, bywriting.
even if you don't think you'regoing to do anything with it,
(45:21):
first of all, it becomes yourrecord to yourself of what's
been going on inside of you.
It could be as unemotional asyou overhear a funny comment on
the street.
You write it down.
You see something.
(45:41):
A little thought, anobservation, a moment of joy
comes to you if you keep arecord of it, however is
comfortable to you, howeverfragmentary.
That serves as a document, apoint of reference for What your
(46:10):
inner life is.
And it helps you validate that.
It helps you respect it.
And the writing life ispartially a life of coming to
respect that.
to honor your impulses, tothink that if they're
(46:33):
interesting to you, if you learnhow to express them, they could
be interesting to other people.
And it's definitely a chainreaction because I go to
literary readings and the signof a successful reading is that
I want to write during thereading.
(46:54):
As I did that first time, notknowing that that would be the
litmus test for me as apublished writer to, I'm always
looking to feed myself.
So after September 12th did notget published for the 10th
(47:14):
anniversary, I set my sights onthe 20th anniversary.
And I also used that period toto really rethink the book.
And the book that was publishedis the result of that
rethinking.
It's a lot more compressed,which is, of course, the nature
(47:38):
of the best poetry.
And it's structured to give Asort of total experience.
There's a section of poemsabout New York and living on the
river written largely before9-11 as a portrait of what that
(47:59):
life was like.
There's the...
The title sequence about my, Inow call it my adventure that
day because I survived.
The middle section of the bookis a portrait of that town where
I grew up and with manyportraits drawn from documentary
(48:21):
sources of the 11 people whodied.
Then there's a section ofloosely called aftermath poems,
which begin the night ofSeptember 11th, and they go
forward years.
And then the last section,because this is the present, and
(48:44):
it's called The Present, isabout my rebuilt life in
California, in the shadow of9-11, because that will never go
away.
But it's a rich, beautifullife.
If we had not moved toCalifornia, which we did as a
(49:05):
gesture for survival, becauseliving near ground zero became
impossible.
If we had not moved toCalifornia and I had not learned
to feel safe again, I had notlearned that I could have a home
where I could let myself go tothese difficult places without
(49:31):
getting lost in them.
I could not look out my windowsas I'm looking right now when I
look away from you at mybackyard and see beautiful green
plants and the orange tree inbloom.
If I hadn't experienced beauty,natural beauty, again, I really
(49:54):
think that I probably wouldnever have finished this.
Claire Waite Brown (49:59):
So it's an important part of the book to
have that present as well, isn'tit?
To complete the story.
Andrea Carter Brown (50:07):
That was the arc that felt right to me.
And that was the arc that gotfinally accepted for
publication.
And the other thing that seemsto resonate is that there is
present.
there is life after.
So I feel like I'm the sort of,I hate to say it in a teeny,
(50:30):
teeny way, I'm the poster childfor someone who came through
9-11 as, I used to call myself anear survivor, but that's
something of an overstatement,who took me a long time, but who
figured out how to go onliving.
Because survivor guilt is, youknow, there's been a lot written
(50:56):
about it, and it is a realthing.
One of the things that I knowthat you want me to talk about
is what I'm doing next.
Yeah.
This coming 9-11, For the firsttime, I will be in New York
(51:17):
City since we left it in 2004 tomove to California.
And I will be reading from thisbook for the first time in New
York City on the Brooklynwaterfront overlooking the
harbor, which is how I fled.
So I'm extremely excited aboutthat.
(51:38):
But even more possibly, thefollowing weekend, the town
library, the Glenrock PublicLibrary, where I learned to read
and where my mother worked, iscelebrating its centennial.
And they have asked me to be afeatured reader and read from
(52:01):
this book.
Out of so much grief, how couldI have lucked out to have this
charmed, fulfillment of thecircle that began when I fled
that morning, and here I am.
(52:22):
You know, most poetry books, ifthey get any traction at all
among readers, after a year ofThat's gone.
Bookstores are not interestedin giving you readings because
it's not a new book anymore.
(52:42):
And I went into this thinkingthat the first year that this
book came out, that would be it.
But people are asking me toread next spring.
sort of unheard of.
The book just won a silvermedal in a big national contest.
So that will hopefully keep itin front of people.
(53:06):
So I thought that I would be bynow already be ready to move on
to my next project.
But in fact, I feel anobligation to do the best I can
with taking this book out intothe world.
I wrote it for myself, and Iwrote it for the record, but I
(53:28):
see that it's doing some good ina difficult world, and that
really means more to me thananything I have to say.
Claire Waite Brown (53:45):
Fabulous.
And you're going to share someof it with us as well?
Andrea Carter Brown (53:51):
Yes.
So I thought long and hardabout which poem to read.
And I've decided to read a poemfrom the Aftermath section,
which I think touches directlyon what your podcast is about,
(54:13):
albeit in an indirect way.
Okay.
The poem is dated May 2014.
Okay.
So that gives you an idea ofhow long the specific aftermath
continued.
And it is inspired by somethingthat I saw in Cape May, New
(54:38):
Jersey, which is on the mainmigration route from the birds
that winter over in SouthAmerica and Central America who
breed in the Arctic.
And they stop in Cape Maybecause they're exhausted and
(55:01):
they need to fuel up for thelast part of the trip.
This book is called, this poem,pardon me, is called Learning
to Write.
Six months I couldn't write.
Words lost their connection tothe world, meaning itself seemed
(55:23):
impossible, a futile gesture.
But it's hard to live withoutfaith, faith that language can
bridge our differences.
Once I saw three species ofwarblers share a single oak
willow.
(55:43):
Blackburnian, flame-throated,flitted about the sun-licked
top, chestnut-sided in the shadeat the bottom, and the
bay-breasted within the canopy,the tree offering a feast to
exhausted migrants.
(56:05):
Edward Hicks painted ThePeaceable Kingdom over 60 times,
as if art could make it so.
If lions can lie down withlambs and serpents lead a child
(56:26):
to safety, why can't we live andlet live without killing each
other?
but they don't.
Neither can we.
In May, I come upon a plumpyellow warbler, perched at eye
(56:49):
level on a nest at the edge of afield.
No cup, this nest is more of astovepipe, an upside-down top
hat, Four times this spring, tojudge from its height, a
brown-headed cowbird laid an eggin the yellow warbler's nest,
(57:12):
hoping the smaller bird willraise the gigantic chick as her
own.
Four times so far, the warbleradded a new story on top of the
old, abandoning one clutch tolay another.
(57:32):
Four times already, she'saccepted what she can't change
and moved on.
Accept what is and move on,just as birds the world overdo
and have done for millions ofyears.
(57:52):
Across coasts, along coasts,across oceans, up and down
rivers, the Mississippi, theDelaware, my beloved Hudson, the
Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, fromone hemisphere to the other and
back.
(58:12):
Birds have found their way.
Consider that bird sitting onthat skyscraper of a nest, her
yellow breast bright assunlight, her gaze unwavering,
unflinching.
Imagine everything she has doneto get here.
(58:37):
Perhaps we, too, can find ourway.
Thank you so
Claire Waite Brown (58:45):
much.
What a fabulous choice.
Thank you.
Thank you, Claire.
It's been absolutely amazingspeaking with you today.
How can people connect withyou?
I'm on
Andrea Carter Brown (59:01):
Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and
But the easiest, simplest way isto go to my website, which is
www.andreacarterbrown.com.
And on there is a contactbutton.
And anybody who writes me, Iwill definitely respond.
(59:22):
I'm not Stephen King.
I won't get thousands ormillions of things.
And I'd like to hear from youbecause the response to the book
has enriched my life.
my life in ways I neverimagined.
And that's what creativity is.
The life of the imagination,isn't it?
Claire Waite Brown (59:44):
Absolutely.
Oh, perfect.
Thank you so much, Andrea.
That's been such a lovely,lovely chat.
I hope you enjoyed thisepisode.
If you did, perhaps you'd liketo financially contribute to
future episodes atbuymeacoffee.com slash
creativityfound.
(01:00:04):
There's a link in the shownotes.
If you are listening on a valuefor value enabled app, such as
Fountain, True Fans or PodcastGuru, feel free to send a few
saps my way.
And if you have no idea of whatI'm talking about, you can find
out more by listening to mysister podcast called Podcasting
2.0 in practice.
The minute I looked out the living room
window, I knew I had to flee,and I saw very, very difficult
(00:20):
things, which still haunt me.
I headed south to flee becauseotherwise I would have had to go
so close to the buildings thatI would have been in danger of
being hit by falling debris,falling bodies.
I heard a gunshot.
(00:42):
I saw a guy murdered.
And I scribbled away.
And for a couple of weeks, Idid nothing.
But let this poetry spill outof me.
How could I have lucked out tohave this charmed fulfillment of
(01:06):
the circle that began when Ifled that morning?
Claire Waite Brown (01:12):
Hi, I'm Claire.
For this podcast, I chat withpeople who have found or
re-found their creativity asadults.
We'll explore their childhoodexperiences of the arts, discuss
how they came to the artisticpractices they now love, and
consider the barriers they mayhave experienced between the
two.
We'll also explore what it isthat people value and gain from
(01:35):
their newfound artisticpursuits, and how their creative
lives in which they'repractical necessarily Andrea
Carter Brown She wrote her firstpoetry in the darkness of a New
(02:05):
York club and in 2001 had toflee her apartment in Battery
Park as the World Trade Centerfell.
Keep listening to hear Andrea'sfascinating stories and hear
her read a poem from hercollection entitled September
12th that she chose speciallyfor us here at Creativity Found.
Hi, Andrea.
(02:26):
How are you?
Hi, Claire.
I'm fine.
Very happy to be with you.
Oh, you're very welcome.
Since the late 1990s, you havebeen a poet and an editor of
poetry.
But let's go back to yourchildhood and discuss whether
writing and creative pursuits ingeneral were important to you
(02:49):
and encouraged in you by thosearound you.
Good question.
Andrea Carter Brown (02:54):
Very thought-provoking.
I am the first artist in myfamily ever, as far as I can
tell.
I grew up in a household whereneither my mother nor my father
were readers.
We had virtually no books inthe house and I would say no
(03:17):
original art whatsoever.
But very early on, my mothertook me to the library and
encouraged me to read.
I remember going and leavingwith the most number of books
they allowed me to check out ata given time, which I remember
(03:39):
was a pile of maybe a foot high,and the next day going back for
a new pile of 10 to 12 books.
So I would say that reading wasmy lifeline as a child.
I had a happy childhood.
(04:00):
I would say.
It wasn't perfect, but it washappy.
But by the time I became ateenager, of course, like all
teenagers, I became a prettymiserable creature.
And that was when I discoveredpoetry.
My mother started giving mebooks every Christmas.
(04:21):
I still have many of them.
One of the earliest was RobertLouis Stevenson's A Child, a
Garden of Verses.
And And then when I was ateenager, she gave me the
complete Emily Dickinson, a poetI came to revere.
I think she speaks to theunhappy adolescent in all of us
(04:44):
and to the unhappy adult in allof us.
So I would say that shefostered my love of poetry.
First, she nurtured the seed ofNeither of us having any idea
of where it would lead.
It was just something thatnourished me.
(05:05):
At the time, I loved poetry somuch.
But I never considered writingit.
Maybe I tried occasionally, butvery quickly became frustrated
because the standards of poetrythat were held up to me to write
(05:28):
by were so rigid and formal.
The whole Shakespearean sonnetrhyme scheme and meter, well,
that was completely impossibleto me.
It basically still is.
I have to confess.
And so I would try to writealong those lines and very
(05:50):
quickly knew that nothing goodwas going to come out of that.
And I aspired, though, to writelike the greats.
And if I could write like thegreats, I wasn't going to try.
I would say I wrote my firstpoem when I was in my mid-30s.
(06:13):
And we can get back to how thathappened.
In college, I studied French.
I studied French literature andlanguage.
I did my master's in Paris andconsidered moving there
permanently.
But eventually, I decided thatAmerica was where my roots were,
(06:38):
and I had to reconnect withthem.
So I came back here, and Icontinued working on my PhD in
French.
But Right at the end of it,when I was getting ready to
write my dissertation and defendit, I had done all of the
coursework.
I had taken my orals.
Really, I woke up one daysaying to myself, what are you
(07:02):
doing?
This is preparing you to teachFrench, teach college.
I had had offers anddepartments were interested.
I swore I would never be ateacher.
But here I had a wholeeducation which prepared me to
do that.
And I walked away.
(07:23):
So strong was my aversion tobecoming a teacher.
This university had given mefellowships, and they had
invested a lot of money in me,and I felt quite guilty for a
long time that I had not donewhat I thought they wanted me to
(07:44):
do with my French studies.
And that haunted me for a longtime.
But I had to make a living.
And I had been working inbusiness part-time to supplement
the money that the universitygave me because it wasn't really
enough to live off of.
(08:06):
And I was a bookkeeper.
How did I become a bookkeeper?
My two aunts were bookkeepersand my father taught math.
And I had always liked numbersand been good in what is now, I
now understand it's not math,but arithmetic.
(08:26):
But anyway, and I put a lot ofnumbers in my poems.
I still love them.
And I sort of slid into thiscareer as a businesswoman and
left the French behind.
And I did that for a while,basically through my 20s into my
early 30s.
And then I had this otherwake-up call when I was working
(08:56):
very long hours.
It was...
a very demanding job that I hadat the time.
And there wasn't time foranything else.
I remember I took a two-weekvacation to England.
And when I came back, my bosssaid to me, well, you know you
(09:16):
can't take two weeks together.
We can't have you away for twoweeks together.
I thought, why give me thevacation?
I had three weeks vacation.
I wasn't even taking all of it.
I mean, I understood, but Ididn't want to live like that.
And the form that epiphany tookwas, I want to write a book.
Claire Waite Brown (09:41):
So do you think that was perhaps an
ultimatum to something that wasmaybe already formulating in
your brain to go back to writingor maybe feeling disillusioned?
satisfied with the accountancy.
And then that was like thecamel that broke the, no, the
(10:01):
straw that broke the camel'sback.
Andrea Carter Brown (10:04):
You know, I think you're probably right,
but it was on such asubconscious level that I was
not aware of it myself becausewhen I was studying French and
The French literature that Iloved the most and that I wrote
all of my biggest papers aboutwas French poetry.
And what do you do with that?
(10:28):
I mean, I wasn't going to writein French.
All I could do with that waswrite about poetry that other
people had written.
And I didn't want to do thateither.
Yeah.
So...
I do think that there were alot of threads sort of coming
(10:48):
together.
But the reason I mentioned thatI came from a family with no
books that didn't read, I mean,actually, all of us had Bibles.
My mother was quite religious.
And I think that not having anyart in my family history means
(11:14):
that it did not occur to me tobe an artist.
There were no models for it.
And my parents had no way ofnurturing that other than my
mother nurturing my reading.
I remember the first time Ishowed my father a poem I had
written.
It was a rhymed poem inquatrains.
(11:37):
It had been published in a bookand it had won a little prize.
So I thought, okay, it has theimprimatur of someone else
deciding that this was aworthwhile poem to publish now I
can show it to my father and heasked me to read it I read it
he said But it doesn't rhymebecause I was using the kind of
(12:02):
rhymes that we use these days,which are slant rhymes and off
rhymes.
And it wasn't that Hallmarkcard kind of hard rhyme.
Part of my path, and I thinkit's why it took me so long to
get to it, is that I've beeninventing my own wheel.
(12:23):
Nowadays, there are so manywriters that come out of writing
programs.
There were very, very few ofthem when I was in college.
I think the first programs inthis country got started in the
70s.
(12:43):
Well, I was finished with, I'mgiving myself away here, but I
had finished my education prettymuch by then.
And the same thing, I'm goingto detour a little bit, applies
to my editorial career, which Icame to after I came to poetry.
But the minute I started doingediting, I thought to myself,
(13:07):
Why didn't it occur to me tobecome an editor?
I came out of college with adegree in literature, with a
graduate degree in literature.
It would have been unnatural.
Well, I didn't even know thatsuch a path was possible.
I
Claire Waite Brown (13:25):
think
Andrea Carter Brown (13:25):
a lot of people slip into what their
families have done.
And And to the extent that theyhave a talent that that
fulfills, in the case ofaccounting for me, I've
maintained my love of numbersand I've found an expression for
(13:47):
it in my writing.
But doing the books for otherpeople's businesses per se, was
just as bad as writing aboutwhat other people wrote.
Claire Waite Brown (14:01):
Yeah,
Andrea Carter Brown (14:02):
yeah.
So I'm a late bloomer.
You've got a late bloomer onyour podcast.
Claire Waite Brown (14:08):
We love them.
We like them very much.
But I know what you mean.
It's not the first time thatit's come up that it never
occurred to me that doing such athing was a thing you could do.
You know, artists, authors,editors, that certainly has come
up a few times so you said yougot fed up right you go and go
(14:33):
right I've had enough now ofdoing the accountancy what does
then that actually physicallylogistically mean you then do or
did like the next day the
Andrea Carter Brown (14:47):
next day um I started going to the Lincoln
Center Performing Arts Library.
I was living in New York at thetime because there was a 19th
century pianist, Clara Schumann.
I knew about her.
(15:09):
My husband plays the piano.
He plays Robert Schumann.
He plays Beethoven.
He plays Brahms.
And if you know anything aboutRobert Schumann and Johannes
Brahms, you've heard of ClaraSchumann.
But I think she stuck in mymind because going back to
(15:31):
childhood, if I could have beenanything, I would have been a
pianist.
I loved music.
In retrospect, I don't think Ihave the talent.
I mean, I don't have the mindfor it, but I was born with a
minor birth defect, whichprevents me from playing the
(15:55):
piano.
And I don't have the full useof one of my hands.
But it didn't prevent me fromsitting at my aunt's piano and
trying to play the piano hoursand hours and hours until her
husband, my uncle, begged her totell me to take a break.
(16:17):
And so the idea of writing abook, of exploring this woman's
life, fascinated me.
As it turns out, reading abouther struggles, her own
struggles, to become asuccessful artist and to balance
(16:40):
her art needs with her domesticlife has served as an
inspiration to me ever since.
I went to the library.
I said to my husband, I'm goingto write a biography of Clara
Schumann.
What can I say?
(17:00):
Was that pie in the sky orwhat?
I had never written a poem.
I Clara Schumann spoke andwrote in German.
All of her archival materialwas then in East Germany.
I had to learn German.
(17:22):
I had to study how to readmusic.
I took a little crash course inmusic history, and I read
everything that I could read.
And I worked on this book forprobably four years.
I had inherited a modest giftfrom a friend of a family, which
(17:47):
I had never spent.
I didn't know why I held on toit.
But again, it was there for meto use.
I did a research trip for fivemonths in Germany and East
Germany.
And then I came back and I...
I worked on the book until Igot to a section of her story
(18:11):
which I could not emotionallyhandle.
And I hit writer's block.
And that part of the story,since I can see from the
expression on your face.
After she was widowed as a37-year-old woman with seven
(18:37):
children, rather than raise themherself, she sent them out to
foster homes.
usually separately.
A couple of them stayedtogether.
So she could go back andperform.
She traveled all over Europe.
She played for Queen Victoria.
(18:58):
She was a the diva of the pianoworld at this time, I felt
judgmental of her for makingthat choice.
If you're writing a biography,you fall in love with your
subject.
You try to see your subjectwarts and all because that's
your responsibility.
(19:18):
But if you don't love yoursubject, you can't really write
the book.
And when I became judgmental ofher, I lost my love of her.
This chapter about her life, Imust have rewritten the opening
(19:39):
paragraph for months on end.
Yeah.
And eventually, the inheritancegave out.
So I went back to workpart-time as a freelance
accountant.
That set the stage for what Idid next.
Claire Waite Brown (20:00):
Yeah, so that's a lot of work and a lot
of time and a lot of emotionalas well as physical energy being
put into that, which then, asyou've explained, abruptly came
to a stop and couldn't go anyfurther, which is fascinating.
How did you then start writingpoetry?
(20:22):
How long was it until you gotwork published?
How did that all kind of moveon?
Andrea Carter Brown (20:30):
So from this position of writer's block
on this gargantuan project, afriend knew how frustrated I
was, and I didn't know what todo.
She took me to a poetryreading.
She was going to themregularly.
I wasn't.
I didn't even know theyexisted, to tell you the truth.
(20:51):
It was so far out of my realm.
But she went to the Mondaynight series at the 92nd Street
Y in New York City, which isprobably the most famous reading
series in the U.S.
And I had never heard of theperson who was reading.
Her name was Mary Jo Salter.
(21:15):
She was reading from her firstcollection of poetry, which was
called Henry Purcell in Japan.
I want to interject that MaryJo has gone on to have an
illustrious, wonderful career,and she's still writing.
And while she was reading thesepoems, the dam broke.
(21:36):
I'm sitting there in the dark.
I'm hearing her write what shewrote about living in Japan.
It was her immersion in aforeign culture.
And my experiences doingresearch on Clara Schumann in
(21:56):
East Germany swelled up in me.
And I found a scrap of paperand I scribbled away.
this, poetry spill out of me.
I must have written a poem aday.
(22:17):
First poems I ever wrote.
I still have them.
Almost immediately, I knew thatthis was what I wanted to do
and what I was meant to do.
That work has largely neverbeen published, although it will
(22:37):
be in my next book, because thepeople and the experiences that
it was about in East Germanyhad told me that it was
dangerous to them if I wroteabout them, stayed in touch with
them.
So I had this incrediblyintense, almost existential
(22:59):
experience of being there bymyself in this world.
very grubby industrial EastGerman city, which is
coincidentally where thearchives were, and meeting these
fabulous people who were tryingto support themselves as
artists.
(23:20):
in a repressive politicalregime, what were they doing?
They were in a puppet theater.
So you could say things in EastGermany, if you did them with
puppets, carefully, that youcould not say as me speaking to
you or in your own voice.
And believe me, at that time,that was the only cultural thing
(23:45):
to do in this whole littlecity.
So I wrote those poems.
It made me happy to write them,even if I couldn't share them
with the people who had inspiredthem.
And very quickly, I said, Ineed to do what I can do to
(24:06):
become a better writer.
So I started taking workshops.
In New York, there's a lot ofthem.
I studied with a for about fouryears.
(24:26):
So this brings us up to likelate 80s, 90.
And in one of those workshops,the last poem that I wrote won a
little prize.
And my teacher, his name wasNicholas Christopher, who had
really busted me the whole time.
(24:48):
I studied with him for a year.
I thought every time I wouldcome home from the class, I
would open the door to theapartment, come in, close the
door, and burst into tears.
And my husband started worryingthat I was like a masochist.
But he was such a toughteacher.
But I wanted to please him.
(25:08):
And on this poem, he wrote, nowthis is a poem.
Wow.
And that was enough to buoy meon to the next level.
Claire Waite Brown (25:24):
Yeah.
Andrea Carter Brown (25:26):
And from that period, my work began to be
published in Some of them verygood journals.
It was the very beginning ofthat period that the poem that I
read from my father dates.
Claire Waite Brown (25:43):
Yeah.
Andrea Carter Brown (25:44):
So...
Learning how to live with thenumber of rejections you get
from sending your work out is anacquired skill, and not
everybody has it.
And there are people I've knownover the years who could write
beautifully, but who justcouldn't stomach the sort of
(26:06):
constantly putting yourself outthere and not getting accepted.
case, there was enough positivereinforcement through this
period, and it increased until Ihad a small collection of poems
(26:31):
published called a chapbook,which won a little prize.
And then I I had a full-lengthcollection, which made the
rounds again.
You get rejected for theindividual poems, but you also
get rejected for thecollections.
You keep reworking the poems.
(26:53):
Even when they've beenpublished, you never finish,
really.
Anyway, that full-lengthcollection got accepted and was
published in 2006.
By then, 9-11 had happened.
Claire Waite Brown (27:16):
Yes, because I want to talk to you about
your book, September 12th, whichwasn't published until 2021.
Yes.
And it's about your experienceduring 9-11.
So can you tell me about yourexperience and maybe why you
(27:41):
chose to, or maybe it wasn't aconscious choice, to wait until
2021 to publish that collection?
Oh,
Andrea Carter Brown (27:51):
boy.
Okay.
Well...
9-11 changed my life inabsolutely every way.
As I write about in the book,we lived in an apartment which
was a block as the crow fliesfrom the World Trade Center.
And we had lived there since1987.
That part of New York is calledBattery Park City.
(28:14):
We lived on this sliver oflandfill which had been then
developed between theskyscrapers in lower Manhattan
and the Hudson River.
It was a pretty magical place.
It still is.
So the morning of 9-11, I wasin my apartment getting ready to
go to one of my accountingclients because I was still
(28:36):
part-time an accountant.
And I didn't hear anything.
I didn't know anything washappening.
until my sister called me.
Having seen the footage on GoodMorning America of the first
plane going into the NorthTower, she knew how close I was.
(28:58):
And her first word, she didn'teven say hello.
She said, are you okay?
And of course, I was okay.
But The minute I looked out theliving room window, I knew I
had to flee.
(29:20):
And I saw very, very difficultthings, which still haunt me.
And it took me a hundred milesand...
12 hours to reach my husband inWestchester, where he was
(29:48):
coincidentally on a businessmeeting.
He thought I was dead for thethree hours that I couldn't
reach him because cell phoneswere down.
And everything I did that daywas to survive.
But I kept my eyes open, and Iwatched, and I saw, and I wanted
(30:17):
to record what I had seen.
I headed south to flee, becauseotherwise I would have had to
go so close to the buildingsthat I would have been in danger
of being hit by falling debris,falling bodies.
So anywhere else seemed likethe best way to go.
(30:43):
And the only other way wassouth.
I ended up on Staten Island.
From Staten Island withstrangers, I went through New
Jersey, up across the Tappan ZeeBridge into Westchester.
Over the course of that day, Imet wonderful people.
(31:05):
I saw more horrible things.
And I thought, this is part ofthe historical record.
I want to record this so thatthe story of 9-11 is fleshed out
in human terms.
(31:26):
For example, I was taken intothe house of a complete
stranger, a woman on StatenIsland as a sort of way station.
And she took in 50 people.
Well, when I was in that house,which is now crammed with
people who had fled, I lookedaround and it was a microcosm of
(31:53):
New York.
All races, tourists, youngpeople, old people, you were
sort of throwing yourself on themercy of strangers.
Will you take me to the bridge?
And as we were doing that, wecame to a very poor area of
(32:14):
Staten Island.
And there were people millingaround.
All over, there were peoplemilling around.
No one knew what to do.
They were watching TVs.
This place had a bettingparlor.
And the TV, of course, wasn'tshowing races.
It was showing the televisioncoverage.
As we were sort of askingstrangers, I heard a gunshot.
(32:40):
I saw a guy murdered.
He was about maybe 100 feetaway, Max.
I saw the police come, pull ablanket up over him, put him in
the back of the hearse, theambulance.
(33:03):
They perfunctorily interviewedthe people which were hanging
around.
They didn't arrest anybody.
But there were more importantthings to do than worry about
one little murder on StatenIsland.
But, you know, I had neverexperienced that.
(33:27):
I mean, I've had a lucky life,Claire.
What can I say?
And even, I want to say about9-11.
I'm filled with gratitude forall of the things and the people
who helped me survive, endure,get this book written.
And...
(33:48):
You know, the day wasn't theend of the story, of course, for
those of us especially.
Well, of course, it wasn't theend of the story for people who
lost loved ones that day.
And they are still struggling.
You know, everybody respondsdifferently to tragedy.
(34:12):
Some people have the ability tosort of wall it off and go on
with their lives.
Other people are, it becomesthe defining moment of their
lives, and they cannot move on.
And then I would put myselfsomewhere in the middle there.
(34:35):
That's the short version of whyit took 20 years to get this
collection of poetry published.
I didn't start writing it for acouple of years.
Unlike many other artists whowere confronted with that
experience, I did notimmediately sit down and write
(34:58):
about it.
This was my second case ofwriter's block.
And I mean, this was acompletely different kind of
writer's block because, and Ithink the poem that I'm going to
read for you is about this.
So I won't describe it becausethe opening of the poem talks a
little bit about that.
But once I started writing,about a year and a half later, I
(35:25):
would say, to be completelyaccurate, to bear witness as
accurately as possible requiredmy being willing to go
emotionally to the experiences.
And I'm one of the people whohas post-9-11 respiratory
(35:49):
disease because of exposure tothe dust.
It's under control.
It took a long time to get itunder control.
But during this period, we hadnot yet found...
Actually, the doctors didn'teven really know what it was.
They tried all the traditionalthings, and it wasn't recognized
(36:09):
as a particular kind of asthma,a particular kind of pulmonary
disease.
Every time I started writingthis material...
after about five or six hours,I would start having the illness
would come back.
And so I would be literallysick in the same way.
(36:35):
And What can you do?
You have to respect that.
It's your body telling yousomething.
But I had to learn to live withit if I wanted to get this book
done.
So the account of that day tookme probably a couple of years
(37:00):
to write.
That's the title sequence of mybook called September 12th.
It was originally written assonnets, as interconnected
sonnets, going back to thoseadolescent fears I had.
Not end rhymed, but they feltlike sonnets.
(37:23):
And the last line of...
One sonnet would become thefirst line of the next sonnet,
which is a sort of wonderfulnarrative bridge.
And for a long time, I thought,well, this is the perfect form
for this material, because itsort of divides it into a
manageable...
(37:45):
chunks.
You know, I recognized rightaway I had trouble reading it.
I knew readers were going tohave trouble reading it.
I had trouble writing it.
So I felt an obligation if Iwanted them to read it to make
it manageable.
But then during that time, lifewent on.
(38:07):
For me, the life that went onwas a life which for a while was
was dominated by the aftermathissues.
Our apartment was contaminated.
Maybe the apartment buildingsweren't destroyed, but all of
(38:28):
the businesses were shut.
All of the transportation wasshut.
The traffic was of the dumptrucks and the workers on the
site coming and going to getinto our apartment complex to...
have the air tested, have itindustrially cleaned, have FEMA
(38:53):
come in, have the Red Cross comein, have the insurance adjuster
come in.
We had to go through a washingfence that people coming onto
the site and leaving the sitehad to go through.
So much has happened in theworld that's so painful ever
since.
And so we're sort of used towartime scenes of devastation
(39:18):
and death.
But for those of us living inthe States then, this was really
our first direct experience ofit.
So the book grew.
I didn't only want to be a bookabout my experiences bearing
(39:40):
witness to that day, but Iwanted to tell the story of what
it was like to go on with yourlife under these circumstances.
Sometime during that earlyaftermath, I learned that the
small suburban town in NewJersey, where I was born and
(40:02):
grew up, it's called Glenrock,New Jersey, lost 11 people that
morning.
It was a town of about 7,000people.
A mile in diameter.
Everyone knew everyone else,directly or indirectly.
And when I learned about thosepeople, it opened up to me.
(40:29):
to the kind of wider grief thatwe were all numb at the time.
We were just like automatonsdoing whatever was absolutely
necessary in figuring out how todo it.
And we were surrounded bypeople trying to find loved ones
(40:52):
who had disappeared, thecoroner identifying body parts.
When When they started removingdebris from the site, they
would load it onto dump trucks,and the dump trucks would go up
to the closest docks.
(41:13):
where barges could be moored,which was just north of Battery
Park City.
It's an area which I walkthrough all the time.
And they would dump the debris,the girders and all of the mess
on these barges.
They would hose it down becausethey knew by then that the dust
(41:38):
was toxic.
They would put a screen over itand then tugs.
would haul those barges downthe Hudson River to the landfill
on Staten Island where theydeposited it.
So on one side of our apartmentwas Ground Zero, the site.
(41:58):
And on the river side was aprocession of these barges.
Anyway, I tried to finish thebook for the 10th anniversary.
And I had a version of it.
And I don't think the writingwas quite there yet, but I
(42:25):
thought it was.
I thought it was.
I tried to place it.
I sent it all over the place,and nobody wanted it.
There is an aspect, too, tonobody wanting it, was that we,
as a culture, We're trying tomove on.
(42:46):
We had blinkers on.
It's a survival mechanism, butit's also one of the things that
I'm going to detour a littlebit that I've discovered since
this book came out is thatpeople here are hungry to tell
(43:13):
their stories about it.
where I was, how I learned, whoI knew, and every time I do
readings.
Strangers come up to me andthey share these very intimate
details, and they're so happy tobe able to share them with What
(43:39):
I think I've discovered is thatwe never shared it.
We lived through it, but wedidn't tell our stories.
And storytelling is, I think,necessary for healing.
Not everybody would agree withthat, but telling stories is
(44:05):
fundamental to being human.
It's what we do that otherconscious animals don't do.
When that process is cut shortor frustrated, the material
stays inside of you, but itfeels like unresolved material
Claire Waite Brown (44:30):
in a way then you you have and you had
beforehand a means to get thatout what do you think is What do
you feel for other people thatmaybe don't have that?
(44:54):
How can they help themselves?
Andrea Carter Brown (44:59):
Whenever I talk about it, I tell people to
keep a record of their thoughts.
On your cell phone, orally, bywriting.
even if you don't think you'regoing to do anything with it,
(45:21):
first of all, it becomes yourrecord to yourself of what's
been going on inside of you.
It could be as unemotional asyou overhear a funny comment on
the street.
You write it down.
You see something.
(45:41):
A little thought, anobservation, a moment of joy
comes to you if you keep arecord of it, however is
comfortable to you, howeverfragmentary.
That serves as a document, apoint of reference for What your
(46:10):
inner life is.
And it helps you validate that.
It helps you respect it.
And the writing life ispartially a life of coming to
respect that.
to honor your impulses, tothink that if they're
(46:33):
interesting to you, if you learnhow to express them, they could
be interesting to other people.
And it's definitely a chainreaction because I go to
literary readings and the signof a successful reading is that
I want to write during thereading.
(46:54):
As I did that first time, notknowing that that would be the
litmus test for me as apublished writer to, I'm always
looking to feed myself.
So after September 12th did notget published for the 10th
(47:14):
anniversary, I set my sights onthe 20th anniversary.
And I also used that period toto really rethink the book.
And the book that was publishedis the result of that
rethinking.
It's a lot more compressed,which is, of course, the nature
(47:38):
of the best poetry.
And it's structured to give Asort of total experience.
There's a section of poemsabout New York and living on the
river written largely before9-11 as a portrait of what that
(47:59):
life was like.
There's the...
The title sequence about my, Inow call it my adventure that
day because I survived.
The middle section of the bookis a portrait of that town where
I grew up and with manyportraits drawn from documentary
(48:21):
sources of the 11 people whodied.
Then there's a section ofloosely called aftermath poems,
which begin the night ofSeptember 11th, and they go
forward years.
And then the last section,because this is the present, and
(48:44):
it's called The Present, isabout my rebuilt life in
California, in the shadow of9-11, because that will never go
away.
But it's a rich, beautifullife.
If we had not moved toCalifornia, which we did as a
(49:05):
gesture for survival, becauseliving near ground zero became
impossible.
If we had not moved toCalifornia and I had not learned
to feel safe again, I had notlearned that I could have a home
where I could let myself go tothese difficult places without
(49:31):
getting lost in them.
I could not look out my windowsas I'm looking right now when I
look away from you at mybackyard and see beautiful green
plants and the orange tree inbloom.
If I hadn't experienced beauty,natural beauty, again, I really
(49:54):
think that I probably wouldnever have finished this.
Claire Waite Brown (49:59):
So it's an important part of the book to
have that present as well, isn'tit?
To complete the story.
Andrea Carter Brown (50:07):
That was the arc that felt right to me.
And that was the arc that gotfinally accepted for
publication.
And the other thing that seemsto resonate is that there is
present.
there is life after.
So I feel like I'm the sort of,I hate to say it in a teeny,
(50:30):
teeny way, I'm the poster childfor someone who came through
9-11 as, I used to call myself anear survivor, but that's
something of an overstatement,who took me a long time, but who
figured out how to go onliving.
Because survivor guilt is, youknow, there's been a lot written
(50:56):
about it, and it is a realthing.
One of the things that I knowthat you want me to talk about
is what I'm doing next.
Yeah.
This coming 9-11, For the firsttime, I will be in New York
(51:17):
City since we left it in 2004 tomove to California.
And I will be reading from thisbook for the first time in New
York City on the Brooklynwaterfront overlooking the
harbor, which is how I fled.
So I'm extremely excited aboutthat.
(51:38):
But even more possibly, thefollowing weekend, the town
library, the Glenrock PublicLibrary, where I learned to read
and where my mother worked, iscelebrating its centennial.
And they have asked me to be afeatured reader and read from
(52:01):
this book.
Out of so much grief, how couldI have lucked out to have this
charmed, fulfillment of thecircle that began when I fled
that morning, and here I am.
(52:22):
You know, most poetry books, ifthey get any traction at all
among readers, after a year ofThat's gone.
Bookstores are not interestedin giving you readings because
it's not a new book anymore.
(52:42):
And I went into this thinkingthat the first year that this
book came out, that would be it.
But people are asking me toread next spring.
sort of unheard of.
The book just won a silvermedal in a big national contest.
So that will hopefully keep itin front of people.
(53:06):
So I thought that I would be bynow already be ready to move on
to my next project.
But in fact, I feel anobligation to do the best I can
with taking this book out intothe world.
I wrote it for myself, and Iwrote it for the record, but I
(53:28):
see that it's doing some good ina difficult world, and that
really means more to me thananything I have to say.
Claire Waite Brown (53:45):
Fabulous.
And you're going to share someof it with us as well?
Andrea Carter Brown (53:51):
Yes.
So I thought long and hardabout which poem to read.
And I've decided to read a poemfrom the Aftermath section,
which I think touches directlyon what your podcast is about,
(54:13):
albeit in an indirect way.
Okay.
The poem is dated May 2014.
Okay.
So that gives you an idea ofhow long the specific aftermath
continued.
And it is inspired by somethingthat I saw in Cape May, New
(54:38):
Jersey, which is on the mainmigration route from the birds
that winter over in SouthAmerica and Central America who
breed in the Arctic.
And they stop in Cape Maybecause they're exhausted and
(55:01):
they need to fuel up for thelast part of the trip.
This book is called, this poem,pardon me, is called Learning
to Write.
Six months I couldn't write.
Words lost their connection tothe world, meaning itself seemed
(55:23):
impossible, a futile gesture.
But it's hard to live withoutfaith, faith that language can
bridge our differences.
Once I saw three species ofwarblers share a single oak
willow.
(55:43):
Blackburnian, flame-throated,flitted about the sun-licked
top, chestnut-sided in the shadeat the bottom, and the
bay-breasted within the canopy,the tree offering a feast to
exhausted migrants.
(56:05):
Edward Hicks painted ThePeaceable Kingdom over 60 times,
as if art could make it so.
If lions can lie down withlambs and serpents lead a child
(56:26):
to safety, why can't we live andlet live without killing each
other?
but they don't.
Neither can we.
In May, I come upon a plumpyellow warbler, perched at eye
(56:49):
level on a nest at the edge of afield.
No cup, this nest is more of astovepipe, an upside-down top
hat, Four times this spring, tojudge from its height, a
brown-headed cowbird laid an eggin the yellow warbler's nest,
(57:12):
hoping the smaller bird willraise the gigantic chick as her
own.
Four times so far, the warbleradded a new story on top of the
old, abandoning one clutch tolay another.
(57:32):
Four times already, she'saccepted what she can't change
and moved on.
Accept what is and move on,just as birds the world overdo
and have done for millions ofyears.
(57:52):
Across coasts, along coasts,across oceans, up and down
rivers, the Mississippi, theDelaware, my beloved Hudson, the
Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, fromone hemisphere to the other and
back.
(58:12):
Birds have found their way.
Consider that bird sitting onthat skyscraper of a nest, her
yellow breast bright assunlight, her gaze unwavering,
unflinching.
Imagine everything she has doneto get here.
(58:37):
Perhaps we, too, can find ourway.
Thank you so
Claire Waite Brown (58:45):
much.
What a fabulous choice.
Thank you.
Thank you, Claire.
It's been absolutely amazingspeaking with you today.
How can people connect withyou?
I'm on
Andrea Carter Brown (59:01):
Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and
But the easiest, simplest way isto go to my website, which is
www.andreacarterbrown.com.
And on there is a contactbutton.
And anybody who writes me, Iwill definitely respond.
(59:22):
I'm not Stephen King.
I won't get thousands ormillions of things.
And I'd like to hear from youbecause the response to the book
has enriched my life.
my life in ways I neverimagined.
And that's what creativity is.
The life of the imagination,isn't it?
Claire Waite Brown (59:44):
Absolutely.
Oh, perfect.
Thank you so much, Andrea.
That's been such a lovely,lovely chat.
I hope you enjoyed thisepisode.
If you did, perhaps you'd liketo financially contribute to
future episodes atbuymeacoffee.com slash
creativityfound.
(01:00:04):
There's a link in the shownotes.
If you are listening on a valuefor value enabled app, such as
Fountain, True Fans or PodcastGuru, feel free to send a few
saps my way.
And if you have no idea of whatI'm talking about, you can find
out more by listening to mysister podcast called Podcasting
2.0 in practice.
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