Category: writing

Among the many routes to becoming a poet, two basic themes emerge. There is the solitary scribbler, the Emily Dickinson model. And then there are the poets like those fortunates who gathered in Robert Lowell’s office or blossomed in Stanley Kunitz’s garden, who
flourish best in a community. They find a workshop, a place to listen, a place to read, people whose work they respect, and they begin to find their own voices. That’s how Prabakar T. Rajan did it.

I heard Rajan read at the Cantab in Central Square, Cambridge. It is a poetry community I also found when I arrived in Boston from New York. His route, though, was longer and more circuitous, beginning in his native India, winding through England, through his years of training as a psychiatrist. It was in England that he began writing poetry more seriously. He says it was because of the light.

“In England there is a tenderness of light. In India there is a very brief twilight and dawn at either end of a long day of bright sunlight. When the light is more muted that does things to your mood. It becomes an impetus for reflection, and I started writing about fall and twilight in England.”

When he arrived in the Boston area, he began spending time in front of the poetry shelves at the Brookline Booksmith, devouring the work of Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Philip Levine, and others.

“I was beyond rescue after that,” he says. He was smitten with poetry, but he also felt paralyzed. “What I read on the shelves overwhelmed me.”

Then he found his poetry home at the Cantab, a venue I’m glad he lucked into. If they are to be nurturing, poetry communities of all types–workshops, open mic venues, graduate programs–need to be respectful, to offer an example of people working hard at their craft, to listen and respond thoughtfully to the work that’s offered. It’s easy to find bad ones, where the prevailing atmosphere is self-indulgent and disrespectful. At the Cantab, by contrast, the hosts tend to know what they’re doing and audiences are famously welcoming, especially to the newbies who haltingly confess it’s their “first time.” Rajan felt so at home there, in fact, that he joined a workshop run by Ron Goba, the venue’s doorman and resident father figure.

“Honestly I feel privileged to have the Cantab,” Rajan says. “Unlike with the poet you meet on the shelf, here you can hear the poet’s work and then you can shake her hand and talk with her. What could be more magical than that? Just imagine getting to do that with Hart Crane.”

Rajan now has a chapbook out, Leaving Ripples. It, too, in a way is a product of the communal experience he has found in poetry. He explains that when he first began writing, he started with fiction and actually wrote part of a novel. But he found himself constantly distracted by thoughts of who the readers would be and how his work could find its way to them.

“I was disillusioned with prose because I was always thinking that I had to take it somewhere. With poetry, you can have an audience of one or two and it’s wonderful.

“Writing is too serious to be left to publishers. The venues where poets perform is in the verbal, narrative poetry tradition. It’s how poetry was originally transmitted. I feel I’ve rediscovered an ancient tradition and a place of true brotherhood, well, siblinghood, where you are linked with other people through a line or a phrase that you or they have spoken.

My home state, Delaware, has a post-election tradition called Return Day, when winners and losers parade together in a show of good will. Sure, some smiles look a little tight and the parade, admittedly, is even smaller than the state, but the ritual is a reminder that administrations come and go, while much of the country’s truest work continues in places far removed from the great halls of power. Places like the MCI Framingham women’s prison, where Elizabeth Lund teaches poetry.

“I was attracted to the idea of writing as a transformative experience,” says Lund, who covers and reviews poetry for the Christian Science Monitor. She has been a finalist for the Brittingham Prize, the BOA First Book Award, and has read at the Dodge Poetry Festival. “Poetry has a profound effect on a person’s life and on the people around them. I think there’s something in people that responds to poetry. Poetry teaches you something about yourself that you didn’t know before. It gives you back parts of yourself that you didn’t know were there.”

For the women Lund teaches, many with only a junior high school education, studying poetry is indeed transformative. Reading the work of poets like Rita Dove and Gwendolyn Brooks helps them articulate what they know. Learning to write their own poetry gives them a way to find their voices as they work toward claiming a better place in the world. Lund, who has been teaching at MCI Framingham for 10 years, prefers to talk more about her own satisfaction in the work than the gift she is offering. But in a time when personal beliefs are tossed down like gauntlets, the simple act of one person helping another realize her potential seems not only generous but also like the most American of values. That the transformation comes through art makes it even more powerful.

“Poetry has a different meaning to these women. Lund says. “It’s not just an intellectual exercise. It makes them think about what kind of weight their words are carrying.”

Lund describes one woman who wrote about how she used to walk around the prison courtyard with her head down and how she poetry has changed her. Now she walks with her head up.

“Now she’s articulate. She speaks up for herself. She’s learning how to have a voice, on paper and then in her life.”

In describing another woman, who is mentally ill and takes strong psychotropic medications, Lund says, “Poetry is one of the only things that keeps her balanced. I can literally see her stepping back from the edge when she starts talking about something she’s writing.

“They’re not the same people after they’ve been writing for a while. They’re more grateful, more aware. They have more hope, more compassion. It’s an honor to be part of that process.”

In one workshop Lund has taught, “Read to Me, Mommy,” women can make tapes of themselves reading a book for their children. For women who may have had limited parenting choices, it is empowering to select their books, practice reading them effectively before a camera, and send the tapes along with the books to their children.

Lund, too, has been changed by her experiences. In choosing poems and reviewing books of poetry for the Monitor, her criterion is now more clearly whether or not the writer has something genuine to say. And she feels her own poetry is “a bit grittier.”

“It may have made me more clear-eyed, and that’s a good thing. It’s made me aware of what’s really going on.”

Lund’s work clearly does not grow out of the cynical “thousand points of light” idea that assumes volunteers will fill the chasm left after slashing human services funding. No, what I picture here is a single pebble dropped into a pool, the ripples spreading out.

Not us, of course, but some people in this election season aren’t paying much attention to the issues. There’s that cloud of orange alerts circling overhead, grim war news pouring in relentlessly, and no flu vaccine, but we are busy obsessing about the curse that Ruth built or, at our most engaged, which candidate we’d rather kick back and relax with.

“I can think about Bush’s tax policy, about which I can do nothing, or I can think about his cocaine use,” says Jay Cantor, author of Great Neck, Krazy Kat, and The Death of Che Guevara, novels whose characters are passionately involved in their times. He and I are hunched over our coffee in the People’s Republic, talking about why, in this time when so much is critically important, we are eager, instead, to be entertained. It’s the Scott Peterson trial, the Dan Rather apology that draw our attention away from questions about social security privatization, adequate military funding, alternative fuel development. What reaches out and grabs us is the constant parade of advertising and entertainment images and gossip passing for news, what Cantor refers to as “the spectacle.” His argument is that it happens precisely because things are so important, and so seemingly out of our hands.

“If I can have no substantive effect on what is happening,” he says, “what’s more entertaining is what I’ll turn to. The spectacle is overwhelming and interesting, and it is so omnipresent and the techniques are so good.”

The election spectacle, on the other hand, now lasts as long as the term of office and has been known to cause serious campaign fatigue, especially here in a state that already has its assigned color. Some citizens of the Athens of America continue to follow every detail, to be sure. But it gets harder to concentrate all the time, especially since the television networks declared themselves officially irrelevant last summer with their truncated convention coverage. And when some of the most cogent commentary is on the Comedy Channel. But even if we remain engaged as war deaths mount and America edges farther from the international community, we seem to doubt that we can have any influence.

“We feel helpless,” says Cantor. “And when I feel helpless, I watch soap operas. During a divorce, what are most of us doing? We’re home under a blanket watching soap operas. Now politics becomes the soap opera. I may feel I have a rooting interest, but it doesn’t affect the outcome. And if I don’t think I’m going to have any effect, soap opera is more interesting.”

Politically, Cantor and I both carry a ‘60s sensibility. I find it impossible to understand disengagement, indecisiveness. Cantor, who is a MacArthur Prize Fellow and a professor at Tufts, points out that, in the ‘60s people knew political involvement was important and felt they could make a difference. And they felt the difference was literally one of life or death.

“During the Vietnam War if you were worried that you might die or you felt guilty about those who had died, it focused your attention. The sheer violence, the possibility of mass atomic death–people felt not only could the world change, it had better change. The successes of the civil rights movement gave people the sense that the world could be entirely different. Drugs played a role, too. It made people feel that their community, their work could be erotic, pleasurable, that nothing was fixed about the world.”

In the 2000 election, by contrast, Cantor says, the feeling was that history was, in some real way, over, that whatever the outcome, the difference would be imperceptible. Although one sunny September morning and two subsequent wars ended that illusion, it somehow did not dislodge our sense of being powerless in the process. This election is poised to teach us either that we can have an impact or that we’d better.

When Jane Holtz Kay was growing up in Brookline, the Back Bay was where you went to the dentist. It was the ‘50s and the Back Bay’s veneer of elegance had peeled a bit.“It was filled with rooming houses and dentists’ offices,” recalls Kay, the architecture critic for The Nation and the author of Lost Boston and Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

By the time I moved here, in 1990, the Back Bay was back again, beautiful and polished. Now, though, it seems not quite itself. Over the past decade I’ve seen it morph from a vibrant neighborhood into “Back Bay-land,” a theme-park version of a quaint urban area, with a salon for every finger- and toenail on Marlborough Street. I remember when the Pops played classical music on the Esplanade, when three bookstores thrived within a two-block stretch, when trash bins outnumbered newspaper boxes. Now, with notable exceptions, the unique, quirky shops are in other places–Charles Street, Roslindale, Porter Square–while Newbury Street grows fat on stores owned from afar and staffed by people who don’t know your name and don’t particularly care to. Well, to be honest, neither do my neighbors. People, what’s with the no eye contact, no acknowledgment, no smiling on the street?

In the book Toward the Livable City, Kay contributed a chapter about what makes cities, as she puts it, “lived-in.” The lived-in city, she says, is a place of “impersonal connections….City life is the sharing of space with absent-minded courtesy.”

Still, in Back Bay “absent-minded” often trumps “courtesy.” Unless you’re walking a dog, the neighborhood culture calls for no fraternization.

“The Back Bay lacks neighborhood connection,”Kay agrees, “whether nodding or chatting acquaintances. Perhaps everyone is in their cars in the back alley, versus, say, the South End, where they meet around their street by street park-lets to prune and plant.”

Well, we do have the Mall, the best front yard in the city. But maybe the things that are imposed on our neighborhood make us feel less connected to each other and to the place itself: the groundwater to keep our buildings upright blithely pumped away in construction projects, the (no-longer-local) corporations flexing their entitlement in road races that immobilize the neighborhood, Christmas lights (excuse me, “holiday lights”) on the Mall humiliating the stately trees from Halloween until St. Patrick’s Day, the shops that, as Kay says, all seem “tentative.” Kay notes the French Library is an example of a local institution that once contributed to a feeling of community, “but now is less intellectual in its offerings and less open to the neighborhood.”

Kay continues, “I miss delivery, takeout, and other ancillary services for the carfree…perhaps driven out by the realtors’ overpricing policies. Overall I always say that the Back Bay (and maybe Boston as a whole) is like a baby: if it weren’t so beautiful you’d want to strangle it.”

It’s in there somewhere. Little things pull us together, like the homeless man who used to hand out dog biscuits, and the Mall bench locals donated in his memory. For all its maddening shortcomings, Kay still clearly loves living in the Back Bay. So do I. Sometimes, walking home at sunset in the glow of those brick buildings, I can’t believe how lucky I am to be one of its temporary custodians. So, okay, I’m going to smile at the next person I pass on the street and see if I get at least a nod in return. It would be a beginning.

That sweet familiar face was in the paper again just the other day: Kai Leigh Harriott, smiling her radiant four-year-old smile, her hair pulled back with fancy bows. In the picture you didn’t see the wheelchair. Kai, of course, was paralyzed last July by a random bullet as she played, carefully watched over, on the porch of her home.

If bullets can find them under the watchful eyes of their family, who dares let their children play out of sight? “It’s not a safe world for children unless we plan it that way,” says Irene Smalls. As the author of 15 children’s books, including Jonathan and His Mommy and Louise’s Gift, Smalls has given the subject a lot of thought.

“Play is the work of children,” she says, adding a modern twist on an old axiom that “all work and no play makes Jack an overweight, stressed-out, depressed, and dull boy.” And since, as Smalls points out, children live in a world created by adults, it’s up to adults to make sure that world includes safe and abundant room for play.

Remember summer when you were a kid? There were probably some long lazy unstructured days to ride your bicycle to the library or go to the playground with friends. Now, unless parents are there to watch them, the children are often indoors.

“Children’s play is more restricted now,” says Smalls. “They’re not jumping up and down and playing leapfrog, and there’s an impact on the child and on the whole society.”

Not a good impact. Kids aren’t supposed to be sitting indoors on summer days. Children who aren’t free to play safely outdoors spend their time less actively, and, consequently, we have a new term–childhood obesity–to learn about and deal with.

In a chapter she contributed to the recently published book about Boston, The Good City, Smalls wrote about her first home in the city in the early ‘80s. It was on St. Botolph Street, filled with families drawn to its roomy three- and four-bedroom floor-throughs.

“On our block at that time the street was alive with children playing stickball and ring-a-levio and jumping rope,” she wrote, adding that, within a decade, gentrification had put an end to that scenario and stripped the street of nearly all the families with school-age children. “Simply put, to be a truly good city for children, Boston needs much more affordable housing.”

Twenty percent of Boston’s population is under 18. If they were voting age, they’d be a power to be reckoned with. But what’s good for them is good for us all. Says Smalls, “the good city nurtures its young, and also the young at heart, and embraces the importance of fun and play for all ages.”

So while the tourists’ kids are riding the swan boats and patting the ducklings and throwing the tea overboard, let’s look hard at how our own kids are living. Let’s pay attention to affordable housing and safe neighborhoods so that this city that’s been handed down to us can be handed down to another healthy generation. The businesses may be mostly branch offices these days, but the kids we’re growing here are still the real thing.

Time to stock up on good books to read over the summer. I went back to some of the writers I’ve talked with in City Type to see what they’d recommend. And, this being Boston, of course, the selections are hardly the typical beach reads.

Peter Jay Shippy, who appeared in City Type on August 10, 2003 and who is the author of Thieves Latin, says, “I’d recommend Seven-Star Bird, a book by David Daniel. Daniel has designed a lyric panorama of the present from the tragedies of the past and the limbo of the future. Harold Bloom calls him “an authentic heir to Hart Crane.” His poems delineate “the terrible speed of beauty born and passing.”

The second book I’d suggest is Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos. In 1972, at the age of 20, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. His gripping, dark memoir tackles his period of confinement. We watch Gantos begin to replace his dubious past of crime, drugs, and “life on the edge” for his present, as the prize-winning author of more than 30 books.

Charles Coe, (City Type April 20, 2002), author of Picnic on the Moon, recommends Angela the Upside-Down Girl, by Emily Hiestand. “Smart, engaging essays about people and places. I think of her as John McPhee with a sense of humor.”

Coe’s second recommendation is The Red Thread, by Elizabeth McKim. “Elizabeth’s work is very earthy, very elemental. And her language is direct and unselfconscious; she writes to communicate, not to impress.”

Gary Duehr (Feb. 29, 2004), author of Winter Light, suggests Except for One Obscene Brushstroke, a book of poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky that “fearlessly excavates a marriage on the South Shore. It’s very personal, very funny at times, and always close to the bone.”

Philip Hilts, (December 7, 2003), author of Protecting America’s Health: the FDA, Industry, and 100 Years of Regulation, says, “David Baron’s book, The Beast in the Garden is a great read. David Baron wrote the book after hearing of the case of a cougar killing a man in Colorado. He says he was haunted by the story, and over time thought about the meaning of the event. Such killings have now become far more common in the west—cougars in their disturbed modern environs are now habituated to humans. Relations between the species have changed fundamentally. So eventually David wrote the tale: a thriller-style book about the killing and its investigation. Around the story he wraps discussion about life outside the garden—how we have changed the world and its creatures, and now must live with it. Easy to take to the beach.

“I’m just reading another book which I find intoxicating, E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. This is philosophy: an evocative essay on biology, from Wilson’s tales of animalcules living in Antarctic ice to creatures navigating the steaming hot vents on the ocean bottom. Wilson, too, is talking about humans and the planet. He writes, “The living world is dying; the natural economy is crumbling beneath our busy feet…science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find our way through and out.”

Mameve Medwed (August, 2002), author of End of an Error, Mail, and Host Family, says, “Number one is Elinor Lipman’s The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (full disclosure: it’s dedicated to me.) which is just out in paperback. It’s hilarious, touching, with the most engagingly clueless unreliable narrator in the world and a scoundrel who, despite all your prejudices, wins you over.

“I adored Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, which dissects suburbia with a razor-sharp, and yet compassionate, scalpel. It’s familiar territory viewed through a skewed original eye. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Told brilliantly from various points of view, it even has a pedophile you can’t help feeling sorry for. Grab a copy before the Pepperidge Farm fish become chocolate chip cookies in subsequent editions!

“I got Steve Almond’s Candy Freak for my kids who used to spend most of their allowance (and now probably probably a fair amount of their salaries!) on Mars Bars and Snickers. This is the book for anyone (everyone?) who’d pick a Hershey’s Kiss over the other kind.”

Finding the perfect writers’ workshop is like finding the right therapist, and for some of the same reasons. So when you find the right fit, with writers whose professional expertise you respect and whom you can comfortably trust, you’ll do just about anything to preserve it. Even moving the workshop online.

When Kim Ablon Whitney was working on her M.F.A. degree at Emerson, she found that ideal, nurturing workshop.

“We trust each other as readers and as writers,” Whitney says of her five-member group. “We workshop each others’ works in progress and we also definitely offer each other lots of moral support and try to help each other in any way possible in terms of sharing contacts, marketing ideas, etc.”

And, because they all worked in a niche genre, young adult novels, they shared common themes and concerns. The group worked so well that, after the members finished their degrees, they wanted to continue, even though that meant shifting the workshop from their living rooms to their computers.

“Two members moved out of town, so we started the online group in order to keep the group going,” says Whitney, whose first novel, See You Down the Road, won the 2001 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Judy Blume/Work-in-Progress Grant for a Contemporary Young Adult Novel and the 2002 PEN New England Children’s Book Caucus Discovery Award.

The online workshop was its own work in progress. At first each writer just submitted comments on a work directly to its author. But they soon missed the give-and-take quality of an in-person discussion, so they began using an online tracking function where each person could offer and view comments. Whitney notes it’s still second-best to sitting around a table. But she’s discovered an unexpected benefit, the flexibility of reading submissions and making comments on her own time schedule, as long as she does it within the specified time.

Why go to such lengths for a workshop? For one thing, because it provides community in a lonely business. For another, because a workshop can help you be a better writer and a more perceptive reader. The risky downside is exposing unfinished work to critical review. And, as Whitney says, writers are filled with doubts.

“We’re always wondering if the story is interesting, if we’re telling it the right way. Writing a novel is a long process and it helps to have the encouragement of people saying, ‘I’m enjoying this.’“

Criticism never feels good, but it hurts less among colleagues you’ve grown to trust and respect. Whitney says she may disagree with a comment on her work, “but then a day later, I’ll think, ‘well, yes, they’re right.’”

But she also feels there is another reason workshops are so important to writers right now: they can do what most editors no longer do, help shape a manuscript. Editors and publishers and agents are too busy these days to do the kind of nurturing that writers of earlier generations often relied on. They expect to receive a manuscript that is as close to ready as possible.

“Maybe workshops are taking the place of what the writer-editor relationship used to be.”
Guess that’s what friends–and fellow writers–are for.

When Julia Collins started out to write My Father’s War , she assumed it was an unusual story: a young man full of promise going off to fight, returning physically whole but with a spirit so damaged that he never regained his old life, the damage touching everyone around him. Collins was surprised to find the story more common than she imagined.

It’s what happens in war. It’s an old, old story, one we’ve been immersed in once again this past year. Some soldiers die. Others, even the ones who seem to resume the progress of their lives, return forever changed in body or spirit. And those at home are changed as a result.

Collins’ father had been a young man who loved to joke and sing. He graduated from Yale, joined the Marines, and was part of an intelligence squad in the Pacific during World War II. When he came home to marry and start a family, he was clearly a different person. A spark had vanished. Collins describes the bewilderment of being a child whose father carried a deeply unreachable part.

“The Dad I ended up with was cynical and heartbroken,” she says. “He had lost the feeling that his hopes could come true. He was always proud of being a Marine and serving his country in a heroic way, but he had seen the basest side of human nature while he was doing our dirty work. That human toll, that degradation of body and spirit is what my dad came to understand about combat.”

Still, Collins says her father never lost his yearning to cross over to, in the words of his favorite song, “the sunny side of the street.”

“He was a very hard man to love. He hurt us in so many ways, but I always understood he had been through something I had to respect, something larger than our daily lives.”

I understand some of that. My father was there, too, in the Army, in combat. The shrapnel scars that ran the length of one leg were just the outward sign. But even though his life progressed seemingly undisturbed, he had lost a piece of himself, and we lost that part of him, too.

Any extreme experience–and what is more extreme than war?–burns us down to our essence, exposes the core of who we are. It’s why, decades later, military records become the stuff of political campaigns, why military service remains something to be worn with pride. And we who stay safe at home are touched by the experience of those close to us, or simply by being the ones in whose name they fight.

“In memory of anyone who has lost life in war,” Collins says, “and for the sake of the people we’re going to send to wage combat, we have make sure we’re being honest about our reasons.”

Collins remembers a conversation she had, just before the start of the fighting in Iraq, with the five surviving members of her father’s squad. She describes the men as “all proud Marines with no regrets for their WW II combat roles and ranging from lifelong Republican to liberal.

“They were all dead set against the Iraq war. I was struck by their unanimous disapproval, because the public, at the time, was so gung-ho for war. These old warriors know a thing or two about battle. They know the public’s appetite for vengeance generally means the other folks, mostly young kids, get to fight and die.”

Okay, it looks like the worst is over. The city’s been a construction site for more than a decade. Now that there’s light at the end of the I-93 tunnel, I am thinking that all the digging up and sifting through, the re-envisioning, reclaiming, reshaping makes the Big Dig an irresistible metaphor for writers.

I think of Thoreau ,and Robert Lowell to Sue Miller and Marie Howe–in a different environment, would they have written different works? Do we write differently when our landscape is in upheaval? As pieces of the elevated roadway disappear, I wonder what post-Big Dig Boston will look like in writing.

“The archetypal Boston that writers imagine,” says Gary Duehr , “might shift from the Boston Common/ Public Garden/ Beacon Hill/ Back Bay model to one closer to the water, a Boston of piers and waterfront lodging–something that echoes the original Boston.”

Duehr has thought a lot about the city. Duehr is a poet who teaches poetry and writing at Bunker Hill Community College, Lesley University, and Boston University. One of his three books of poetry, Where Everyone Is Going To, is set in Boston. He is also a founder and director of the Invisible Cities Group, which stages performance events that draw on the history and character of city places.

On a day when snow is in the air, Duehr and I meet in a tiny Somerville restaurant warm with pictures of El Salvador and Guatemala. A few blocks away is Sullivan Square, which, Duehr tells me, was once a green oasis with fountains and playing children and ladies and gentlemen strolling in their Sunday best. What I see in 2004 is a monument to transportation: a large T station and a handful of indomitable buildings hunkered beneath a crosshatch of flying highways. A person living in the area then and now would have quite different experiences. A writer living in sight of it would surely write two very different types of stories, depending on the moment in time.

What is changed when the landscape is altered goes far beyond physical surroundings. We write in a new way, just as we live in a new way. That is why the next phase of the Central Artery Project, the development of the freed-up ribbon of land stretching from Chinatown to North Station, is more important than what we have already lived through. it will affect not how we drive, but how we live.

“The idea that the city is trying to reinvent itself, edit its shoreline, reimagine the face it presents to the Atlantic and to the rest of the world,” says Duehr “gives the whole city, including writers, a sense that anything is possible, that you can make drastic changes and open yourself up to an unknown future. “And, of course,” he adds, “upheaval and messiness are generally good for writing, at least the kind I do. Out of the mess some meaning gradually emerges.”

Well, it’s time for the meaning to begin emerging. By now a writer would be able to see where the novel or the poem is going. Same with the city. At this point, after years of planning, years of detours, the direction for the project should be clear.

The point wasn’t putting the traffic underground. The point was putting it underground for a reason, to reshape the city. It’s time to find the clear route to the new vision of what our city, our writing, and our lives can be.

When I moved here from New York in 1990, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. What a gem of a city! Okay, I noticed a few quirks, primarily traffic-related. “Merge” and “don’t block the box” are unknown concepts here, along with any notion that pedestrians might take some responsibility for their own safety. But the most baffling thing about this wonderful city is how eager it is to feel inferior. Even to Providence, for heavens sake. But mostly to New York.

From dueling sports teams to the summer’s upcoming dueling political conventions, Boston’s gaze seems to leap from navel to Empire State Building in a single bound. Maybe it’s understandable in a city where we live so intimately with an unrivaled past: it used to be all about us.

“Boston has probably never gotten over the southward shift in the country’s center of gravity,” says George Packer, a writer who moved to New York after 16 years in Cambridge. Packer is now a staff writer for The New Yorker, a fact which, as he notes, probably says it all.

Being a writing New Yorker, he finds, has a very different pace. Here he wrote four books, including the novel Central Square. In New York, by contrast, he has written countless magazine articles, including a recent exhaustive and thought-provoking piece on the American troops in Iraq. But no books. Boston, he notes, is a city for reflection; New York, for immediacy.

When I spoke with Packer, he reminded me that the author William Dean Howells wrote about just that in his 1890 novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes. In words that sound right today, two of Howells’ characters have this exchange:

“There’s only one city that belongs to the whole country and that’s New York.”

“Yes I know, and Boston belongs to the Bostonians.”

Packer, whose nonfiction books are solidly grounded in history, points to the turning point. The end of the 19th century was a symbolic moment when Boston’s position began to ebb and New York’s economic growth and openness to immigration began to move it into predominance.

“It’s been a long century,” Packer says. It was a century that saw Boston settling ever more comfortably into its armchair of academic preeminence, old neighborhood loyalties, and storied past. Sometimes it seems the city turns outward, wistfully, only when it notices what fun New York is having.

“Boston never expects to replace New York,” says Packer, “but it wants to be a contender.”

Contenders, though, need to be lean and fast. Boston, for better or worse, moves a little more slowly. While New York razes its history to make room for the newest new thing, Boston is paced for long-haul contemplation, rehabbing its Victorian buildings to house Lucky Brand and Starbucks with wireless Internet access. But Boston also tends to prize doing things the way they’ve always been done, if for that reason alone.

As Packer puts it, “There are ways in which Boston is good for the soul, and ways in which it stifles the soul.”

Boston has been a balm for this writer’s soul, offering me gifts New York never would have given. I am profoundly grateful. As a writer, I’ve found Boston simultaneously large and intimate, its palpable literary tradition both intimidating and encouraging. There is much to be said for the smaller pond. Oh Boston, you’re my home.