“Are you watching this?” The phone call from SFR publisher Andy Dudzik came early in the morning. 

 I’d quit my job as a reporter covering state government in Phoenix two weeks before.  The morning of 9.11, a girl I was seeing called to wake me. She said we were under attack.

A student walked in late to first period and I gave him a hard time about it. “A plane just hit the Pentagon,” he said with a smile and a shrug. “It was cool.” 

 Like many aspiring writers, I planned to move to New York after college. When the towers fell, I stayed in California for a few years before eventually trying to make it there.

A high school sophomore, I walked from biology to health class and saw the TV turned on and the towers smoking. One student told me we got bombed, which is what I first thought.

When I learned about the attacks on the Twin Towers, I was a tenth-grader stationed in Miss Feige’s English class in Westerville North High School in Westerville, Ohio.