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Jin, born and raised in China, could never have predicted the life he has as an acclaimed writer of English-language novels and poetry and a professor of English at Boston University. In 1985 he arrived at Brandeis to study English literature in preparation for an academic career in China. But after the killings in Tiananmen Square, return felt impossible. His most clearly marketable commodity was a degree in English, so, in a fiction-worthy plot twist, his new language became his means of survival–and of artistic expression.

Now, 17 years later he is the author of nine books, including Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, and the newly-released novel, The Crazed.

Recently Jin sat in the fall sunshine, calm amid a hubbub of hurrying students and Commonwealth Avenue traffic, and reflected on the adopted language now at the center of his life. “In the Chinese language I had clear traditions. In English I had to reconstruct my literary heritage. Once I decided to live differently and write differently, I had to understand the consequences. I wasn’t just writing a book. My life, my existence would be in another language.”

His decision has led to him to write of his native country in the language of his present one. “I believe a writer mainly exists in one language. But I think it is good to have another language to supplement your thinking, your perception, and your choice of words. English is a more rational language compared with Chinese, which is more speculative I have to write with all the weight of the language and that is very hard. English is more expressive, more liberating, more powerful. The United States is a superpower and English is a super-language.”

Adnan Adam Onart is another writer who has chosen English as the language of his writing. Onart, whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Boston Poet, International Poetry Review, and Poetry Motel, first began writing poems in 1994, in his native Turkish. Then he began translating his work into English. Ultimately, he began writing directly in English.

“I write and I speak in a very specific language, the language of first-generation immigrant Americans,” he said recently, sitting in a nearly-deserted coffee shop. “My poetry is written in that language. The language varies with the country of origin. In my case, I have difficulty with articles because Turkish has no articles, and with the placement of adverbs. It is a language I pronounce in my mind differently.”

“Writing in Turkish is not any easier than writing in English. I was experiencing life elements in Turkish. Once I made the switch, I experienced them directly in English. My poetical universe became more and more entrenched in English.”

Still, Turkish has a major role in his life. Onart notes that, after a weekend at home speaking Turkish with his wife and watching Turkish language television programs, he often finds his English a little rusty on Monday morning.

Like Jin, Onart is aware that choosing to write in English has pulled him out of the literary context he had within the Turkish poetry community. “When I write English I forget completely that I speak Turkish. I feel I am immersed in the English language and influenced by English language poets. But I am not part of a community.”

Also, like Jin, Onart uses his new language to write about the culture of his birthplace. “I have a certain experience I would like to convey to an American audience–my daily life as I was growing up in Turkey, with a long, rich history in a specific place. And I feel a special obligation to introduce Crimean culture and history to an American audience.”

Onart also comes from an area of the world with deeply complex political sensibilities, which he tries to leave behind when he begins to write. “I take extreme care not to recreate the tensions, the hatreds from other parts of the world to my adopted country. We should bring richness in our luggage but leave dirty laundries behind. America, the way I perceive it, is a country of fresh starts.”

And new words.

Der-Hovanessian never wanted to be president of the New England Poetry Club, the group she has led for two decades. “I’m not the type to be president,” she protested when she was first asked. It was especially daunting for her to think of heading a group whose first two presidents were Amy Lowell and Robert Frost.

Der-Hovanessian, whose 20 published books include seven volumes of translations of Armenian poetry, recalls that she finally let herself be talked into taking the post, “because of my Armenian name.” When she joined in the late Œ70s, the New England Poetry Club had a roster heavy with Anglo-Saxon heritage. The box for the club’s prestigious Golden Rose Award is engraved with names like Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Mary Oliver, and Galway Kinnell.

Over lunch in her book-filled home, Der-Hovanessian said,”I knew it was going to change the club if I became president, and I wondered if I had a right to do that. But I think it was good for the poetry scene. At the time there weren’t poetry slams. The Grolier wasn’t having readings and the Blacksmith House series didn’t exist. There weren’t other voices being heard.”

To bring some of those other voices to the Boston poetry audience, Der-Hovanessian encouraged the club’s board to invite Native American poets, as well as those from faraway cultures such as the Soviet Union, Japan, the Caribbean, Romania, and Finland.

I felt our mission was to entertain people with good poetry, and to provide a place where poets could find fellowship. We have always tried to get the most interesting, best poets we can.”

Der-Hovanessian acknowledges that the time she has given the New England Poetry Club has cut seriously into her own writing time. She has lost track of exactly how many years she has been the group’s president. “If I really ever counted, I’d probably quit,” she says.

It’s a sentiment Michael Brown could understand. As the host of the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab in Central Square for the past ten years, Brown knows all too well what behind-the-scenes work it takes to keep the poetry coming. The press releases; the scheduling; the national and international contacts with touring poets; the logistics of doorkeeper, sound system, and books for sale all are invisible but necessary chores that eat away at writing time.

“It take time away from my own writing,” he said in an interview at a Central Square outdoor cafe. “But paying attention to other people’s poetry challenges me to write well.”

Like Der-Hovanessian, Brown had a vision of new voices he wanted to bring to area audiences. The slam, in which poets compete in a format that values presentation as much as poetry, was an exotic Chicago import that took a while to find a venue and an audience. But when it took hold, it really made an impression, expanding the scope of poetry to include a completely new group of poets and listeners.

“After the ’60s I never thought I’d be in the forefront of a cultural movement again,” Brown says, looking back at the growth in the poetry audience nationwide, and in the Boston slam audience that fills the Cantab’s downstairs room every Wednesday night. Brown, author of The Falling Wallendas and the newly-published The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides, says “I’m riding a surfboard on a cultural wave. I feel very fortunate to be in a place that values the written word and has a nucleus of quality poets.

“We’re always looking for the next great writer. Our main goals at the Cantab are to give new people their first feature, to have a good representation of what’s going on nationally, and to find the strongest poets from our own community. We draw an audience that’s not only poets. And everybody who comes in to read or to listen broadens the appeal.”

The New England Poetry Club’s readings are held the first Monday of every month from September to June (in January it’s the the second Monday) at 7 at the Cambridge Public Library on Broadway. During the summer, readings are on alternate Sundays at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.

We also, each of us, had a story of that day–the way we heard, the people we knew, the ones we held close–that we needed to find a way to tell. For the poets, musicians, photographers, the response was instinctive. For those who felt they had no immediate way to express their sense of the experience, the Boston Artists’ All Souls Project offered an entry point.

The Project grew out of a collaboration initiated by Clara and Bill Wainwright, the founders of First Night, who recognized the need for a communal response to September 11. A major piece of the Project was a series of free writing workshops held in neighborhood branches of the Boston Public Library, led by poet and writer volunteers from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the writers’ groups PEN New England and the Writers’ Room.

“People had an over-abundance of memories and feelings that they were anxious to share,” said Steven Ratiner, literary coordinator of the All Souls Project, who understood the overwhelming difficulty of writing about the event. In one of his own poems, he wrote, numb and bewildered, of “…the old/ universe/world where we once/ blindly made a home. Ashes.”

Ratiner, who is the author of Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, has served as poet in residence in nearly 200 schools and is experienced in coaxing writing out of those who don’t think of themselves as writers.

“The hard part of this was to reflect on the experience in a way that would lead to writing. It felt too big. I wanted to find some narrow window that would create a small starting point for someone who may not think they’re carrying around an important part of the story. I asked the people in my workshop to think about sound.”

For one workshop participant, Mary Agnes Mullowney, that became the starting point for a poem. She wrote, “There must have been a sound/ a whoosh/ a sigh/ a rumble/…but we never heard it/ as we watched/ over and over on TV/ silent buildings, folding down upon themselves/ as if made of/ silk.”

On September 11, poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett was making an effort to lead one of her regular poetry workshops while waiting for news of her son, who was in one of the World Trade Center towers. He ultimately emerged alive and she later wrote of “…the same God my son is/ calling on now, as he/ trembles with the others/ in the shattering from/ which he will be spared.” When Helfgott Hyett heard about the All Souls Project, she knew she had to volunteer.

“I believe in poetry,” she said. “It’s definitely my religion. I knew this would be important, a peace-making gesture.”

The author of four books of poetry, Helfgott Hyett worked with a co-leader, poet and teacher Sue Roberts, to compile a packet of poems. Using those poems and brief free-write periods, the workshop participants worked to make sense of a world at once normal and permanently changed.

“I was standing on the front steps,/ contemplating my face in the storm door,/ worrying about my sparse white hair, ” Allen West wrote of the innocent moment just before hearing his wife’s “urgent voice/ calling from the top of the stairs” and thinking that, perhaps, he had forgotten to close the latch.

And Laura Hawes remembered, “while I have been on my knees trimming/ the yellow grasses…/ three jets have exploded/ into three splendored blossoms, though/ the season is wrong and it is impossible.”

For Stephanie Bresnahan, who once taught an ESL (English as a second language) class on the 55th floor of Tower 1, the thought of people standing helpless at those windows reminded her of how she had been drawn, on her breaks, to the mesmerizing views. And she thought, too, of one particular student, and wrote, “Before I left New York,/ Amadeu took me to Windows on the World/ to thank me for teaching him/ then disappeared into an elevator/ until today.”

“In the workshops,” said Barbara Helfgott Hyett, “some of us were poets and some of us became poets.”

A quote she often refers to, from Ernest Becker’s book Denial of Death, speaks to our instinctive need for art during times of crisis: “The most that any one of us can seem to do is fashion something‹an object or ourselves‹and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

Yes, it’s the time when the air is heavy and the reading is light. Of course, on the Red Line, people still read Sartre, but for most of us, it’s the season to dash to the bookstore for the fun summer read before we pack our sunscreen and head for the beach. There’s a time-out kind of restlessness luring us into the sunshine to play or into a dark cool theatre for a brainfreeze of movie silliness. The languor of the weather touches writers, too, and beckons them toward lighter work.

“I was looking into the maw of a big ugly revision of a big ugly novel and it’s hot,” says Almond, who is the author of My Life in Heavy Metal, a collection that includes the Pushcart Prize-winning story, “The Pass.”

Over a bowl of shrimp and noodles at Pho Pasteur in Harvard Square, he elaborates.”When it’s oppressively hot, the last thing I want to do is be engaged in a writing project that feels oppressive. I have no desire to sit with sweat dripping down my face, writing the great American novel. Part of it is physiology–I schvitz. And most of my stories take place in hot weather. I write with my computer on my lap, throwing off heat, and I sit in my boxer shorts writing about guys who are sitting in their own cruddy apartments in their boxer shorts.”

Aside from the heat, there is the rhythm of the year that is particularly hard on Boston writers. In an atmosphere ruled by the academic calendar, summer just naturally feels like vacation.

Almond says, “It’s time to strip down. It’s too hot for heavy self-exploration. It may be a huge rationalization, but I’ll face that grim possibility in the winter.”

On the other hand, especially for writers who teach, there is always the fantasy that, once school’s out, the writing will begin. Almond nods in recognition, laying the last of the shrimp shells to rest in the peanut sauce dish.

“You think it’ll all happen in the summer. You’ll be a writing machine and work eight hours a day. Right. Just when everybody is heading to the Cape and looks insufferably tan and is telling you about their vacations, this is the time you’re supposed to be writing the big heavy novel? Forget it!”

Author Mameve Medwed is hard at work on a novel, but the work seems to fit the season: she is obsessed with passion. Medwed, author of the Cambridge-centric novels Mail and Host Family, is reworking a pivotal scene in her forthcoming book, The End of an Error. The scene depicts more passion than she generally gets explicit about, and she is obsessing over it with editors, friends, and fellow writers.

“I’m having bizarre conversations with editors about things like whether or not he should unsnap her garter,” she says. “I’m trying to up the passion quotient. I keep putting the passion in and taking it out and wondering if I’m somehow passion-deficient. But I guess what better time to be talking about hot things?”

Medwed most often tackles ambitious new work in the fall, her nod to the ebb and flow of the school calendar. What she generally prefers to do in the summer are small projects–essays, reviews, travel articles. She especially enjoys writing book reviews, which she finds a combination of work and pleasure. In June she was delighted to receive a stack of “summer reading” books to review for New York Newsday–light reading, with writing to match.

“I don’t write well in the summer,” she says. “I think I’m constitutionally incapable of thinking clearly when it’s hot. I do most of my writing when it’s horrible out. There is nothing better than to be in your study writing when it’s gloomy and you can hear the rain on the roof. When the weather is beautiful and all the world is outside, all I want to do is walk to Harvard Square for an ice cream.”

But this year, thoughts of passion have claimed priority. “This summer I haven’t pulled a weed. The house is in shambles–it always is when I’m writing,” she says, sitting in her decidedly non-shambled kitchen with its exuberant collection of ceramic cupcakes, wooden pies, fabric fruit, and other non-edibles on every surface.

Medwed is eager to shake off her lusty musings. “I’m obsessed right now, but in the next two weeks I’m going to finish the scene Then life will start up again.”

No writer works alone in Boston. The city’s literary heritage nests on windowsills, hovers above keyboards, and is breathed in with the sturdy New England air. And its effect on its writers can be felt in every aspect of their work.

There is the physical setting. “I’ve been walking through the city since 1956,” Davison says, “writing in notebooks wherever I went. There is a sense of Boston being all around you.” In his “Poem in the Park,” you recognize the walk “through the bricky streets” to the Public Garden, and “… the sky of the public park,/its gates ajar, its paths cast wide in welcome…” In another, a diner at the Ritz contemplates the swordless statue of George Washington. His ever-shifting walk to his North End office inspired, “Walking Through the Big Dig.”

And the layer of tradition. Davison can point out where the city’s publishing houses were once grouped around the Common. He can tell the stories of how Julia Ward Howe had her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” first published in The Atlantic in 1862–they paid her about eight dollars–and that Samuel Eliot Morison always turned in his stories a little ahead of deadline.

But the city’s most profou “nd influence on writers is undoubtedly its rich history as home to legendary writers and the lessons they handed down. The city’s size made it more likely that young writers who wanted to learn those lessons could. Davison, for example, recalls walking down a Beacon Hill street and having a lively argument with the poet Robert Lowell about Macbeth.

“Lowell was such an extraordinary figure,” says Davison, “and his “For the Union Dead” is one of the great city poems.”

Lowell was also an influential teacher and creator of a poetry community that drew writers and held them here. Lloyd Schwartz, the author of three books of poetry including Cairo Traffic, and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning music critic, became part of that community.

Schwartz expected to return to to his native New York when he finished his graduate work at Harvard in the late 1960s. That didn’t happen. What did were things he feels could never have happened anywhere else.

Schwartz’s “Cambridge was the Cambridge of the poets,” as Peter Davison wrote, about a different poet in a different Cambridge. It was a time when Lowell held his famous “office hours,” where anyone could drop in to talk about poetry. Those who did included soon-to-be-major poets like Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Gail Mazur, Jonathan Galassi, and Richard Tillinghast. Jean Valentine Íor Elizabeth Bishop might stop by if they were in town.

“There was an attitude toward poetry that was really thrilling,” says Schwartz. “It had to do with everything I loved about poetry–with intellectual and emotional ambition. It was not just spinning words and inventing images, as beautiful as that can be. There was a sense that poetry was an important thing to be taken seriously. There were possibilities and we were helping each other realize them.”

Schwartz remembers when his first poem was accepted for publication. “It was a dramatic monologue, probably not the type of poem I would have written in New York.” But what also would not have happened in New York was that, when Schwartz excitedly called Frank Bidart to tell him, Lowell was at Bidart’s apartment.

In the Henry James story, The Jolly Corner, a man visits a house haunted by the ghost of the person he might have been. Schwartz finds that the story’s echoes are with him whenever he thinks of the New York job he didn’t take after graduate school. Whether it was his involvement in the theater, his becoming a music critic, his teaching career, or his work as a poet, everything he has done has been shaped by the fact that he has done it here.

“Everything good that ever happened to me,” he says, “happened because I stayed in Boston.” Robert Lowell and the others would, no doubt, be pleased to hear it.

”I remember taking my daughter out in her stroller, and someone called out the window, `Put a hat on that child!”’ says Dooley.

Some say it takes a village to raise a child. Cambridge-based children’s book authors Norah Dooley and Glenna Lang would say what it takes is a neighborhood. Dooley’s neighborhood is Washington Street, a block-long slice of Cambridge’s Area 4. Its colorful multifamily houses and rainbow of residents inspired her books ”Everybody Cooks Rice,” ”Everybody Serves Soup,” ”Everybody Bakes Bread,” and ”Everybody Brings Noodles.” The stories follow a young girl as she goes from house to house on her street and finds those basic foods made in many variations, all gladly shared.

”Everyone says hello. It’s a place where the kids feel safe,” says Dooley. ”They feel looked after, protected. They see their place in the world. They know they can knock on someone’s door if they are locked out or need help with their homework or with a Halloween costume.”

Washington Street’s summer block parties have been famous for an exotic mix of shared foods, music, water balloons, and talent shows that have included one memorable performance piece by a dreadlocks-adorned neighbor dressed entirely in seaweed.

The picture Dooley paints of her neighborhood in her books is partly as it is and partly as she dreams it to be. She says the end of rent control in Cambridge in 1995 ”decimated the landscape of my books.” Some of the people whose bread and noodles figure in the books can no longer afford to live on Washington Street.

Pointing out houses where apartments now command gentrified rents, she asks, ”When the car won’t start or you need a cup of sugar, who are you going to call – a bank?” But the storybook neighborhood as it was before the late 1990s is what Dooley would wish for all city children.

Glenna Lang also uses Cambridge as a backdrop for her children’s books. As an illustrator, Lang created four books in which her drawings were paired with classic poems, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ”The Children’s Hour,” set in the Longfellow House on Brattle Street. She both wrote and illustrated her most recent book, ”Looking Out for Sarah,” which tells the story of a blind woman and her guide dog, using many city backgrounds.

”In Looking Out for Sarah,” says Lang, ”I used a park along the Charles where there are wonderful little concrete animal structures that are brightly colored and have letters on their sides. I think the mundane is appealing to children: very simple things – an old-fashioned grocery store, a post office; city scenes with native animals – squirrels, pigeons. When you’re little, everything is exciting.”

‘Lang’s first impressions on moving to Boston were of the architecture and the neighborhoods. Jamaica Plain’s triple-deckers and the early-’70s North End were among the areas that give her books a sense of place. Her illustrations could be glimpses of Cambridge or Charlestown or Roslindale. They reflect her vision of the wonder of the everyday, made smaller and simpler for her young audience.

”Cities are exciting and vibrant,” Lang says. ”And Boston in particular is so bite-sized. It has a vernacular architecture of colored, simple forms and small scale. It’s a cozy place for children.”

‘Other children’s books set in the Boston area include: ”Zachary’s Ball,” by Matt Tavares; ”The Gilded Cat” by Catherine Dexter; ”Bernelly and Harriet,” by Elizabeth Dahlie; ”Jonathan and His Mommy,” by Irene Smalls.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

It wasn’t the heightened security she objected to. In fact, she agreed to open the snap herself. Instead, it was the routine assumption that anything – anything – she might be asked to do in the name of that security was justified. ”We need to have a sense of ourselves as individuals with rights safeguarded by the Constitution. If we say yes without thinking to everything we’re asked, we give up our rights.”

Flags and patriotic slogans wave at us from billboards and SUVs. But being ”a good American” today feels more complex than it might have in 1776 or 1941. Hershman and another Boston-area writer, Askia Toure, recently talked about what patriotism means to them in 2002.

In Hershman’s novel ”Tales of the Master Race,” unquestioning compliance chips away at individual conscience. A hausfrau worries that the Jewish members of her ladies’ auxiliary won’t allow themselves to be ejected from the group without protest. A civil servant is ordered to examine and measure his fellow townspeople slated for execution. A printer appropriates the firm’s master copies after his Jewish employer has been taken away. These are clearly not people who have said no.

”When someone asks us to do something we think is wrong, we can say no,” says Hershman. Not only can, but should.

”My understanding of America is that the intent is not to create an obedient citizenry. What are we being patriotic to? A government that changes every four years? Patriotism and security might not be the same thing. Patriotism and acquiescence might not be the same thing. Patriotism and civic responsibility might not be the same thing.

”We need to think of what we are as a culture, not just militarily,” she says, pointing to the motto e pluribus unum – out of many, one. We may emphasize the ”one” in times of national crisis, but the ”many” reminds us that we are a country built on diversity.

For Askia Toure, patriotism is a word with long and painful roots.

Toure’s book ”From the Pyramids to the Projects” won the American Book Award in 1989. He was honored for lifetime achievement at the recent Cambridge Poetry Awards.

”African Americans have been the most patriotic people in this country,” Toure says. ”We were patriotic even before we were Americans. We fought in every war, even when we were considered three-fifths of a human being. We were the force that helped Lincoln and the Union defeat the Confederacy, by calling a general strike on the plantations. We worked in this country for [hundreds of years] without receiving pay. What about America’s patriotism toward us?”

While Toure expresses sadness over the devastation of Sept. 11, he has questions about the ensuing flag-waving.

”In the US before 9/11 there was not an excessive amount of love and brotherhood among the various ethnic groups. People may say it’s a new day for this country, but is it? That would be wonderful, but I have my doubts.

”In Roxbury and Dorchester and Mattapan and Harlem – in the chocolate cities of this country – we’re seeing billions of dollars going overseas while there is devastation of the inner cities, destruction of the public schools, drugs everywhere, massive unemployment within the world’s most powerful nation.”

True patriotism, according to Toure, would see reparations paid to the descendants of former slaves that would lift them ”out of third-world conditions and onto a par with white America. That would confirm for us that they believe in patriotism applied to the poor and oppressed in this country.”

For Hershman, patriotism not only allows but requires us to look critically at our country. ”Maybe it’s unpatriotic to be blindly obedient. We need to use our minds and our hearts in the spirit of the country.”

This story ran on page 6 of the Boston Globe’s City Weekly section on 5/12/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.