We’re deep into the September 11 anniversary stories, some conspiratorial, some innovative, some fresh and fascinating (like a story today in the Times called, aptly, Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster). Tomorrow, we’ll have up a round-up of some of the sites we’ve returned to over the years for varied but all very personal takes on the story.

Understandably, a lot of us have September 11 fatigue. I don’t. My connection to September 11 isn’t any more personal than that of anyone else living in NYC at the time who didn’t actually know anyone who died (although my cat got sick on September 12 and never recovered and I blame all toxic stuff in the air). One thing 9/11 did was solidify my thinking about why and how we tell stories.

I did an interview about SMITH with a woman from Writer’s Digest this morning and she asked me why I started SMITH. A lot of reasons, some of which I yammered on about a while back here, but a lot of which I don’t talk about unless I’m really in the mood (which I guess I was today). See, of all the stories on 9/11 the one that stuck to my bones above all others was the Portraits of Grief, those small obits of unknown people that a lot of us read day after day in the months following the attacks. Sometimes we read these stories of Michael D. D’Auria: Success in the Kitchen or Dajuan Hodges: A Dancer and a Ham while alone in our homes; other times sobbing in a subway car while surrounded by strangers. But the song remains the same: the best way the newspaper of record could tell the biggest story of lives was by doing so one person at a time. These people weren’t famous, these people didn’t by most standards leave celebrity-style lives. But when reporters did the hard, hard work of talking to their friends and family, they found something fascinating or heroic or wonderful or weird or wild to say about each and every person who died on 9/11.

Everyone has a story. And everyone’s story deserves to be told. And that’s why we started SMITH.