Today the blog returns from its two-week hiatus with new topics and a call for guest bloggers.

Sadly enough, the events involving the shooting in Arizona - where I live - and Congresswoman Giffords on Saturday, feed into one of the new topics - loss and how it affects your writing.

I happened to be enrolled in my very first Creative Writing class ever on September 11, 2001. It was the fourth class of the semester, a Tuesday, and my day off from work. I had dropped my kids off at school that morning - one at a Jewish Day school and the other at a Jewish preschool. In my car on the way home I had my radio on and the news alerted me to the fact that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York.

The news that day got worse and worse. By noon Arizona time it was obvious, to me at least, that there was the distinct possibility that terrorists were fanning out across the country, attacking various targets. Were the Jewish schools next? I did a U-turn in the road on my way somewhere to go pick up my kids as a precaution, just as my phone rang with the first of the two schools telling me they were closing for the day.

For a bunch of really ridiculous reasons, I had waited until I was forty-one-years-old to ever take a writing class. So, even though as the day was unfolding, writing was looking like the most stupid occupation in the world, I asked my mother to watch my kids so I could go.

I walked into the class and, surprisingly enough, so did all my other classmates. By then, we knew the devastation that had taken place in New York. We all felt embarassed of our writing, of even thinking of writing ever in our entire lives. How could we have ever been involved in something so self-centered as writing, we asked our professor? People were dying, jumping out of buildings, planes were crashing, and we were sitting there writing.

And she said, "Don't ever believe that the work you do is unimportant. It's the writers who will define what happened today for generations to come. It's the writers who will write the books and the articles and explain what life was like on this day so historians can write the history of what this day was like. Without writers, we'd know nothing about the Vietnam War, nothing about the entire history of the human people. It's the writers in a society who put form to experience. Never feel bad about writing. Writing is an important job."

I've been grateful many times for those words of hers, as a matter of fact, anytime something horrible happens. Instead of recoiling from my pen, my pen is my only answer, my only outlet. The only salve I have is words. And I no longer downgrade this task, of putting words onto  pages. I realize that writing about the world, even in a tiny corner of it, is a noble task, and carrying on even while being touched by tragedy is not a contradiction in terms.

JWorld Cafe's new topics come from the topics brought up by the guest bloggers we've hosted. The bloggers who have written movingly of how their illnesses sparked their creativity, of how they wrote themselves through a devastating loss, and how they struggle with labels - being either a Jewish writer or a writer who is a Jew, or if faith has no place in their artistic and creative world.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her memoir, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie will be released this month.