“The Day Everything Changed” came decades before September 11, 2001 for the author of Letters from Algeria.

Her memoir shows how her 1966 epiphany affected her response to the war on terrorism as did two years in Algeria in the mid-1970s, when her friends, neighbors, and colleagues were predominantly Arabs and Muslims—stereotyped as “Other” and unjustly portrayed at times as terrorists. She also describes what took her to Algeria in the first place and what brought her back.

Both serious and funny, this memoir also outlines her year in Spain, gives sometimes startling details of a job search in 1973 San Francisco between her life in Spain and in Algeria, and shares how she created a time capsule with Enduring Freedom, her cathartic play about how differing views on “the day that everything changed” affect a marriage and a friendship.

Tina Martin, author of the memoir Everything I Should Have Learned I Could Have Learned in Tonga, did learn some of what she should have and could have during her two years in Algeria. Before teaching at City College of San Francisco for thirty-two years, she taught and/or trained teachers on five continents—Oceania, Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. Her most eventful decade was the 1970s, when she lived in Tonga, Spain, and Algeria, got her MA in TESOL, got married, and had a baby, now forty-two years old. Her pieces “An Algerian Wedding” and “Crash Course in Spanish:How Getting Robbed Can Enhance Language Learning” appear in the anthologies I Should have Stayed Home (2003) and I Should Have Gone Home (2005), and “God, President Kennedy, and Me” in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth (2011). Her hobbies include walking all over San Francisco and reading, including 120+ books for her mother-son book club founded in 2007.