BoomerGirl Diary

Jean Grant writes while she swims.

Unlike her husband, who surges through the lanes at the local natatorium, Grant keeps a leisurely pace, letting the liquid cradle her as her mind wanders.

“I think about the plot, and I think about my characters,” says Grant, winner of this year’s Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in fiction. “Invariably, I’ll think of a little something. It’s the silence and the water. There’s something about that relaxation.”

Although she started a version of her first novel, “Burnt Veils,” about 20 years ago, Grant has refined the story at the local pool. But it took a journey far beyond Lawrence to dream up the tale.

Born in Montreal, Grant studied in France and lived in Indiana with her husband before moving to Cairo in 1965. The following year, the pair moved to Beirut and loved it so much they stayed a decade — until the escalating civil war threatened to claim their 7-year-old son, who loved to collect bullets from an area crawling with snipers.

They relocated in 1977 to Saudi Arabia, where Grant taught and worked six years as a reporter for Arab News.

“I loved being a journalist,” says Grant, now 64. “I just think it’s the best job on earth. I interviewed camel drivers and U.S. senators and Saudi businessmen — and then all the women because, of course, the Saudi men couldn’t interview the Saudi women.”

That gender separation and other customs of the Muslim world play a central role in “Burnt Veils.” Emergency room doctor Sarah Moss travels to Saudi Arabia to decide whether she can cope well enough with cultural differences to marry Ibrahim, a hydrologist she met in the United States.

“I tried to put myself in her shoes,” Grant says of her heroine. “If I were going to go to Saudi Arabia to see if I could really deal with the culture well enough to marry this guy, what would it be like? What would it be like for me once I decided to marry him despite his awful mother? What would it be like dealing with a brother-in-law who’s very anti-American, who’s a religious fundamentalist, who wants America to fall?”

The two wed shortly before 9/11, despite objections from Ibrahim’s family. Trouble thickens when the U.S. invades Afghanistan, and it climaxes with a fire at the school where Layla, another character, teaches. The tragic scene, Grant explains, is based on an actual 2002 blaze at a Mecca girls’ school that killed 15 students.

“The girls fled from the school,” Grant says, “and it’s been pretty well-documented that the religious police wouldn’t let them out, pushed them back in, because they weren’t properly covered.”

Grant continues to seek a publisher for the novel, which she hopes stimulates readers to ask themselves how big the world can be.

“Does it have to be just our families, our neighborhoods, the places where we’ve grown up?” she says. “Or can we really expand to take in totally different lifestyles? Can we thrive in a place that’s really quite alien? I’d like to think it’s true.”

Poet Denise Low, who served on the committee that selected the Langston Hughes winners, characterized Grant’s work as a good read.

“I think she really has crisp writing,” Low says. “It engages the reader because of the action and the drama. And the situation of colliding cultural backgrounds is really relevant.

“I think as the Arab-influenced world, which has been remote from the American mainstream, is now being integrated into the American mainstream, we especially need books like this to help us imagine how this cooperation is going to happen.”

In the meantime, back at the natatorium, Grant keeps swimming and writing. Her next book — about a mother with a bullet-collecting son who lives in Beirut during the civil war — might be a novel, might be straight memoir.

She says she’s honored, if not a bit embarrassed, to be receiving the Langston Hughes award.

“It’s supposed to be for emerging writers,” she says. “Can you still emerge at age 64?”