Nearly two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Canadian fiction writer Diane Schoemperlen had serious writer’s block.

Her attention constantly gravitated to her television, drawn to the on-going news coverage of the tragedy, unable to process the reality of what had happened.

Then, one day in November, as Schoemperlen watched President Bush deliver a speech about the disaster, she was struck by a story he told about a four-year-old girl.

The child, confused about why terrorists would want to kill Americans, had asked, “Why don’t we just tell them our names?”

This question resonated with Schoemperlen and led to her write her first work of non- fiction, a book titled “Names of the Dead: An Elegy for the Victims of September 11.” Invited to campus by the Canadian Studies Center, Schoemperlen spoke about the process of writing her book yesterday afternoon in Olscamp Hall before an audience of about 75 people.

Canadian Literature professor Beth Casey, who has invited Canadian authors to speak at the University for several years, invited Schoemperlen, whose books, mostly short story collections, are read internationally.

In 1998, Schoemperlen was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her short story collection, “Forms of Devotion.”

According to Casey, Schoemperlen’s usual writing style is irreverent, ironic, innovative and humorous, but she departed from this style in “Names of the Dead,” due to the serious nature of the topic.

Schoemperlen originally intended only to compile a list of the people’s names who died in the 9/11 attacks.

“I got the idea that maybe if I could gather a list … of all the names of the people who had died that day, that it would be a kind of therapy for me,” Schoemperlen said.

As she compiled her list of names, Schoemperlen began to research the people who had died. By the time she was done, she had 80 pages of names and 10 three-ring binders full of information about the victims.

At this point, Schoemperlen said, she realized she was writing a book.

“Basically, from a technical point of view, the challenge was how to take this huge amount of material and distill it down into a normal-sized book,” Schoemperlen said.

Her solution was to print paragraphs of people’s names throughout the book, interspersed with other lists that she felt brought a more human touch to the book.

These lists included things the victims loved and hated, what they were carrying when the tragedy occurred and descriptions of scars and moles that were used to identify bodies.

Also to give the book a more personal feel, she wrote short narratives of what could have been happening in the lives of the victims just before the disaster occurred.

Schoemperlen then added a timeline of the events that unfolded on Sept. 11 and wove this into the book.

“We all knew the numbers were high, and what I was trying to do was write about it in such a way that it wasn’t just an abstract number of people who had died,” she said.

“Emotionally, the challenge was that it was a very hard thing to write about day after day after day.”

But it was the feeling the book needed to be written that kept Schoemperlen going.

“I did feel when I wrote this that I was doing something that really mattered. That was important,” she said.

According to Canadian Studies Director Mark Kasoff, Schoemperlen’s book and speech demonstrate that the 9/11 attacks affected Canadians as well as Americans.

“A lot of Americans rightly focus in on it as an American tragedy,, but as you can see, it was also a Canadian tragedy,” Kasoff said. “I was impressed by the substance of what she wrote and why she felt the need to do the research and write what she did, to just get through that horrible event in North America.”