| I was supposed to fly back from Chicago (where I was visiting a friend) to Sarajevo on May 1, incidentally the day that Sarajevo came under siege. So I didn't go back. Virtually overnight, my excellent tourist English became inadequate immigrant English. Moreover, I found out that I couldn't write in Bosnian (let alone Serbo-Croatian), since my experience, as burdensome as it was, was nothing like the suffering in Bosnia, which was in many ways changing the language-that is how Serbo-Croatian became Bosnian. I realized that I would have to write in English and gave myself five years to be able to write a publishable story in English. I began reading obsessively in English, like a person possessed by the library demons. I read everything all the time and made endless lists of words to look up in the dictionary.
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