Art community starts to portray Sept. 11 events

NEW YORK -- Jessica Hagedorn, a fiction writer, expects her next novel to feature a mother, a child and a detective in present-day New York City. What worries her is how, or if, she should weave in the events of Sept. 11.\n"You can't sort of dance around it, but I don't want to make a thing of it, either," Hagedorn said. She is the author of Dogeaters and several other books. "It's so recent and still so deep and bewildering. I feel there isn't enough distance yet, and I'm leery of anyone who would want to try."\nNeil LaBute, a playwright and filmmaker, is ready to try right now. His new play, "The Mercy Seat," has a theme as old as civilization, adultery, but a setting quite near in our memories: New York, the day after the terrorist attacks.\n"It's the kind of relationship drama I have investigated in other writing, but the kind of moral choices they are making in their relationship and in their lives is influenced because of that day," LaBute said.\nA year after the terrorists struck, artists are finding the attacks both unavoidable and unmentionable, too great to ignore for some and too great to contain for others.\n"They shadow everything," Hagedorn says.\nHollywood, which delayed "Collateral Damage," about a firefighter seeking revenge for a terrorist bombing, and other movies last fall, remains reluctant to take on Sept. 11. Some filmmakers hesitate even to bring it up.\n"There may be proposals circulating about Sept. 11, but I don't think anyone is quite prepared to make a statement on a dramatic level," said Robert Dowling, editor-in-chief and publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, an industry trade journal.\nTelevision networks have mostly stuck to straight news coverage, but a handful of narrative dramas are planned. ABC has a movie, "Report From Ground Zero," due to air Sept. 10, telling the story of the first firefighters to arrive at the World Trade Center. Early next year, Jeff Goldblum will star as a combat correspondent in NBC's "War Stories," in which, the network says, "The war on terrorism gets front-page coverage."\nSongwriters have addressed the attacks from the start, and the commitment is deepening. Tributes such as Neil Young's "Let's Roll" and Paul McCartney's "Freedom" came out last fall, along with the militantly patriotic "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)," by Toby Keith.\nFor fiction writers, Sept. 11 is also evolving from topical reference to emotional subtext. New novels by E. Lynn Harris, Pete Hamill and Nick Tosches mention the attacks, but within books largely written before.\nNow, writers must begin in a world where Sept. 11 always existed. Sandra Cisneros, author of the story collection "Woman Hollering Creek" and the novel "Carmelo," said she is interested in stories featuring Muslims.\n"I want to write them precisely because of this fear of Muslim people," Cisneros said. "I feel like I have to write about them and make them human."\nAuthor A.M. Homes, playwright John Guare and poet Richard Howard are among the 110 New York-based contributors to 110 Stories, a literary anthology coming out this fall from New York University Press. The project pays tribute to the number of stories in the fallen towers.\nThe book's editor, Ulrich Baer, says that some authors had difficulty writing and that at least one ended up not participating, like Marie Ponsot, an award-winning poet best known for her collection, The Bird Catcher.\n"I wrote her a letter outlining what we were doing and she sent me back a card that said, 'Thank you so much for your invitation and I will try to write something for it,'" explains Baer, a professor of German and comparative literature at NYU.\n"Two weeks after that, I called her at home and we talked for a while. And she said, 'I have the beginning of the poem, I have the end, but I don't have the middle! Give me five years and I can give you a poem."