Дата публикации: 11-09-2026 12:56:20

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***
Dear Storyboard community:
I moved from California to New York City in late August 2001. 
I had been living in Manhattan for two weeks when I showed up for work in Times Square and discovered that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, just a few miles south. 
After the second plane struck the South Tower at 9:03 am ET, our office building was evacuated. I gathered my belongings, walked east to Fifth Avenue, and slowly made my way uptown, turning around every couple blocks to see the massive plumes of smoke in the distance. 
By the time I reached Central Park, crowds gathered around televisions outside the CBS News studios on 59th Street. I remember the looks on people's faces, in tears, in shock, as they replayed footage of the South Tower collapsing. 
In the days that followed, I spent many nights in Union Square, on 14th Street. It had become a gathering place for candlelight vigils and collective grieving. Posters for missing friends and family members were taped up everywhere. 
I felt fortunate to be a part of this community as it came together, to be a witness to it. But for many years I felt like this was not my story to tell. I lost no friends or family members. I was barely even a New Yorker. What right did I have to share my experience? 
And yet, as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate the importance of telling my own stories. My daughters have interviewed me about 9/11 for school reports. As Garrett Graff writes for National Geographic, “Today some 40 percent of the country is too young to remember the events of 9/11.” Every story, however small, adds to our collective memory and shared understanding. They connect us. 
I think frequently about the power of "Portraits of Grief,” the New York Times project in which reporters crafted 200-word vignettes for 2,310 of the nearly 3,000 people who died on 9/11. “We weren't mourning an anonymous mass of people, we were mourning thousands of individuals,” the late novelist Paul Auster wrote about the profiles in 2001. “And the more we knew about them, the more we could wrestle with our own grief.”
For more stories and remembrances from 9/11, see the Nieman Storyboard archive.
You have your own story to share, too. My guest on this week's Nieman Storyboard podcast, author and editor Sari Botton, taught me so much about the power of personal storytelling when she was the essays editor for Longreads. She's now editor and publisher of popular Substack publications including Oldster Magazine and Memoir Land, and she's written her own memoir, “And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.” She shares some important insights about her journey, as well as advice for writers who might be working on their own personal stories.
Author and editor Sari Botton on giving yourself permission to write personal essays
Sari Botton. (Photo by Kate Warren.)
“People are so concerned about whether they're going to be a likable character if they tell the ugly truth. [But] that's what makes you a likable character. It makes you someone that people can relate to. It means you're just human.”
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Links of note
“Don’t Make My Mistakes: A Guide to Reporting in Unfamiliar Places.” For Study Hall, journalist Hannah Docter-Loeb breaks down the key questions reporters should consider when writing about a community that is new to them. 
Science journalist Christian Elliott explains how one of his sources for a National Geographic story, a 77-year-old retired librarian named Phil Gordon, was so interesting that he became the main character in an entirely different profile. “I spent maybe two hours with Gordon in total,” Elliott writes. “In that time, he dropped so many quotable lines I had more material than I knew what to do with. When we drove up (and parked behind his dented white pickup, full of driftwood logs collected on the beach for unspecified reasons), [we] found him sitting on a rickety wooden platform dangling over Pacific Ocean. He offered us bourbon and peanut butter.”
Journalist Leah Sottile reflects on six years of writing her newsletter (and perhaps another data point in whether you should start your own): “It has since become a major part of my writing life — a thing I very much look forward to working on each month. So, yeah, I guess it made me feel better. Sometimes the writing comes to me easily, sometimes I totally panic about writing something worthy of your hard-earned dollars. It has never been my goal to be the biggest writer on Substack, and it shocks me every time I meet someone in the real world who says they are one of the 5,132 people reading this newsletter every month. There is something that just punches me in the heart every time I hear that, makes me feel so seen, like I’m not just out here making my hands arthritic for no good reason.” 
Keep writing and sharing your stories,
Mark ArmstrongEditorNieman StoryboardFollow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org
The post Personal stories of 9/11, 25 years later appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Основное содержимое страницы с новостью.

A candlelight vigil in Union Square, New York City, 2001. (Photo by Mark Armstrong)

September 11, 2026

***

Dear Storyboard community:

I moved from California to New York City in late August 2001. 

I had been living in Manhattan for two weeks when I showed up for work in Times Square and discovered that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, just a few miles south. 

After the second plane struck the South Tower at 9:03 am ET, our office building was evacuated. I gathered my belongings, walked east to Fifth Avenue, and slowly made my way uptown, turning around every couple blocks to see the massive plumes of smoke in the distance. 

By the time I reached Central Park, crowds gathered around televisions outside the CBS News studios on 59th Street. I remember the looks on people’s faces, in tears, in shock, as they replayed footage of the South Tower collapsing. 

In the days that followed, I spent many nights in Union Square, on 14th Street. It had become a gathering place for candlelight vigils and collective grieving. Posters for missing friends and family members were taped up everywhere. 

I felt fortunate to be a part of this community as it came together, to be a witness to it. But for many years I felt like this was not my story to tell. I lost no friends or family members. I was barely even a New Yorker. What right did I have to share my experience? 

And yet, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate the importance of telling my own stories. My daughters have interviewed me about 9/11 for school reports. As Garrett Graff writes for National Geographic, “Today some 40 percent of the country is too young to remember the events of 9/11.” Every story, however small, adds to our collective memory and shared understanding. They connect us. 

I think frequently about the power of "Portraits of Grief,” the New York Times project in which reporters crafted 200-word vignettes for 2,310 of the nearly 3,000 people who died on 9/11. “We weren’t mourning an anonymous mass of people, we were mourning thousands of individuals,” the late novelist Paul Auster wrote about the profiles in 2001. “And the more we knew about them, the more we could wrestle with our own grief.”

Sari Botton. (Photo by Kate Warren.)

“People are so concerned about whether they’re going to be a likable character if they tell the ugly truth. [But] that’s what makes you a likable character. It makes you someone that people can relate to. It means you’re just human.”

Links of note

• “Don’t Make My Mistakes: A Guide to Reporting in Unfamiliar Places.” For Study Hall, journalist Hannah Docter-Loeb breaks down the key questions reporters should consider when writing about a community that is new to them. 
• Science journalist Christian Elliott explains how one of his sources for a National Geographic story, a 77-year-old retired librarian named Phil Gordon, was so interesting that he became the main character in an entirely different profile. “I spent maybe two hours with Gordon in total,” Elliott writes. “In that time, he dropped so many quotable lines I had more material than I knew what to do with. When we drove up (and parked behind his dented white pickup, full of driftwood logs collected on the beach for unspecified reasons), [we] found him sitting on a rickety wooden platform dangling over Pacific Ocean. He offered us bourbon and peanut butter.”
• Journalist Leah Sottile reflects on six years of writing her newsletter (and perhaps another data point in whether you should start your own): “It has since become a major part of my writing life — a thing I very much look forward to working on each month. So, yeah, I guess it made me feel better. Sometimes the writing comes to me easily, sometimes I totally panic about writing something worthy of your hard-earned dollars. It has never been my goal to be the biggest writer on Substack, and it shocks me every time I meet someone in the real world who says they are one of the 5,132 people reading this newsletter every month. There is something that just punches me in the heart every time I hear that, makes me feel so seen, like I’m not just out here making my hands arthritic for no good reason.” 

Keep writing and sharing your stories,

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