I’d gone there to convene with fellow National Endowment for the Arts panelists over manuscripts submitted for grants; we were to spend four days at it, beginning that Tuesday morning. And so, around eight, I walked from the Henley Park Hotel to the Old Post Office Building, where our deliberation chambers in the Nancy Hanks Center had been readied for us in the style of diplomacy, each station crisply stocked with sharpened pencils, notepads, and bottled water. At nine, we were called to order.A. J. Verdelle, Peter Ho Davies, Josephine Humphreys, Lisa Howorth, Stewart O’Nan, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Rick Moody, Cristina García, Marly Swick, Nicholson Baker, Rikki Ducornet, and me. We had hardly moved past pinning on our name tags when an NEA representative arrived on the scene to announce from just inside the door, “As you know, there has been what appears to be an act of terrorism at the World Trade Center in New York.”We didn’t know it, though. It was news to us. There was shortly a second announcement including such specifics as airplanes and the Pentagon, and a calmly urgent and controlled imperative that we leave the building.
