It’s been almost nine months since the smoke and the glass and the sobbing. Nine months. Children have been conceived, carried and born in the time that has passed since Dan Rather broke down on the “Late Show with David Letterman” as we all relived the horror from angle after angle after sickening angle.

Nine months, and I’m looking toward Ground Zero as I write. For the past eight weeks, I’ve been living in an apartment building two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. The Brooklyn Bridge is four blocks to the northeast, and the Statue of Liberty is a short ferry ride to the south. Every day I walk past merchants selling postcards of wreckage to tourists, and I ask myself whether I’ll ever be able to remember how that Tuesday morning felt.

I bring all of this up because I want five of you to be my columnists, and your first statements to Northwestern at large will appear two weeks after Sept. 11, 2002. This is the truth, and I couldn’t change that if I tried. The effects that two towers, four jets, a five-sided building and 19 butchers have had on our states of mind cannot be underestimated. In those weeks and months that followed, many felt it in poor taste to laugh or to be skeptical of conventional wisdom.

But here’s the trick: We have to laugh, we have to question and we have to criticize, because we’ve lost all direction if we’ve stopped looking for our own answers. I’m offering you the chance to point out injustice, absurdity and tragedy once a week. Five bully pulpits are open, and one of them can be yours.

Here’s all you have to do to fill the position: send two 550-word columns, three fleshed-out abstracts for future columns and one hilarious, short autobiography to [email protected] (or put them in the Forum mailbox on the third floor of Norris University Center if you want to make it more complicated).

To truly distinguish yourself from the tens of people who will no doubt fight for these coveted column-inches, you will need to do the following:

Tell me a great story. It can be inspirational, funny, vivid or some bizarre combination thereof, but make sure you write it brilliantly. I don’t care if your topic is the majority of the population’s inability to appreciate the music of Mary Lou Retton, your words need to sing.

Show your points, don’t yell them. Your evidence and powers of observation and inference are every bit as crucial as your ability to string words together.

Be a reporter. It’s cliche, but it’s the truth. Great columnists are the best reporters in their news organizations. They find their own stories and state them with opinions. When well-researched, this kind of journalism is the most powerful.

Be funny. That is asking a lot, I realize, but do it. Inside jokes are acceptable, but only when disguised as humor for mass consumption.

In the end, a column just has to make people think, argue and laugh. You don’t have to change the world with every one of your words. But I’m not going to stop you if you want to try.