Chances are, you remember where you were when the Twin Towers fell. Perhaps you watched the smoke billow in the distance, or saw the buildings ablaze on television. But Christine Evans has a very different memory of the Twin Towers — one that takes place nine days before the attacks.

“The night sky seemed to have poured itself under our feet,” she recalls the blinking city lights below as she wandered the deck of the World Trade Center, scanning the crowd for her visiting parents. Before they materialized, a small boy came into view. Instantly, Christine recognized that he was lost. 

Today’s "Letter to a Stranger" is a tender story set in an infamous place. It’s no wonder Christine has never been able to forget this tiny stranger, and that — almost twenty years later — she made good on her unflagging urge to write him a letter. 

OA: Your story features 9/11, a catastrophe around which many Americans can place themselves in time. Where — in the scheme of your own life — were you? 

I was nervously ironing a shirt, getting ready for my first day of teaching. I was a second-year graduate student in the MFA Playwriting program at Brown, and it was the very first day of my first class. Then the phone rang, and a friend said, "Turn on the TV, I think we're at war." I did, but I couldn't comprehend the endlessly looping image of a plane crashing into a building. Still, I went off to teach my class. And for the first time, I saw young Americans, who usually dazzled me with their confidence and ease of speech, sitting in shattered silence, lost for words. Lots of them had family in New York.


OA: Do you think the little boy would have stayed in your memory were it not for the tragic event that followed? 

I think I would have remembered him, because that strange feeling of vertigo attended the experience even at the time. But the larger context back-wrote it into a kind of premonition. Current memory science has it that each time we return to a memory we actually rewrite it, and this is definitely a memory shaped by subsequent events.


OA: Are there any anonymous figures in your own childhood that stand out in memory?

When I was a very small child in London, maybe five years old, I used to run away from school. I was hoping to find Peter Pan's Never-Never Land ("second to the right, and straight on till morning.") One day I ran away during a school fair, and the headmistress saw my dash for freedom and enlisted a passing stranger to chase me. This man caught up to me, bent down, and spoke to me kindly. I asked him to promise he wouldn't take me back to school. He promised, but as soon as I took his hand, he stopped talking to me and just dragged me back. I see why now, of course; but at the time I felt completely betrayed.


OA: Australia (your home country) is very far from DC (your current home). How has the pandemic affected your sense of this distance, and your relationship to home in general?

Australia has grown both closer and farther away. The material distance is daunting, and there's not really a way to get back right now. I hate being so far from my family right now, especially my parents, but I talk to them every week and feel pretty close to them. Curiously, I also have two active collaborations with Australian teams right now: I am writing the libretto for a contemporary opera by composer Andrée Greenwell. I also wrote a short play, The Window, for the Australian Theatre Festival in New York on this very theme of home! Our director is in Sydney and our two actors are in Ohio and Brooklyn! So while the distance is painful, the virtual possibilities and connections have really blossomed in exciting ways.


OA: How does your experience in playwriting impact the way you approach fiction and narrative nonfiction?

Theater's a harsh medium, in the sense that you know right away if you're boring people. If you lose the audience for a moment, it's very hard to get them back. I think this is good training for any form of writing. Many effective playwriting techniques translate pretty directly: juxtaposition, embedding exposition in the action, having clear stakes and vividly set scenes. I do love the extra latitude to stretch out in language that prose offers, but it's a shorter leash than one might imagine!


OA: What are you working on now?

My first novel, Nadia, about a Bosnian refugee in 1990s London, just went out on submission with my agent; I'm trying not to obsess about it by focusing on the first draft of the next one! I already mentioned the opera project with Andrée Greenwell, Three Marys; it starts from the Medieval myth of the three Biblical Marys' exile from Jerusalem in "a boat with no oars or sail" and combines it with contemporary stories of migration as today's exiles cross the same Mediterranean in fragile boats. And I just finished two short plays in virtual formats: in addition to The Window for the Australian Theater Festival, I wrote Joy for the Flash Acts Festival, an ambitious enterprise featuring 10 US and 10 Russian playwrights whose work was produced in both languages.


OA: What have you been reading lately?

How To Be an Anti-Racist (along with the rest of white liberal America!). Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips — a gorgeous book. Magdalene: Poems by Marie Howe. I just re-read Ursula K. Le Guin's classic, The Left Hand of Darkness. And Brecht again, with my students.