By David Mehegan, Globe Staff
From the newsroom of The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, Tuesday, August 28, 2007 …..

In writing and in life, she finds balance Leah Hager Cohen’s output has been equal parts nonfiction and novels

BELMONT — Few recent writers have so evenly straddled the fiction/nonfiction border as Leah Hager Cohen. The Belmont writer has published four nonfiction books and three novels, including her new one, “House Lights.” With her next novel, now being written, she will be even at four a piece. Seven books in 14 years is an impressive output by normal standards. Over the same period, however, Cohen got married, had three children, divorced, found a new partner, and started a blog. At age 39, she has found enough tranquillity to work steadily at that which keeps her centered — her writing.

“I get up in the morning, and I’m happy to get to writing,” she said, “and greedy for more hours to write.”

If you had read only her new novel, some of its predecessors might be a surprise. In “House Lights,” set mostly in Boston and Cambridge, 20-year-old Beatrice Fisher-Hart wants to be an actress like her famous grandmother, who is estranged from her daughter, Beatrice’s mother. As she moves closer to her grandmother, Beatrice falls in love with a much older man of the theater. The story is rich with closely observed states of feeling about loved ones and ambiguous implications about the past.

Cohen’s soft voice and manner give an impression of delicacy, but her output, and the books themselves, suggest toughness and drive. Her first, published when she was 26, is probably still her best known. “Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World,” explores the experiences of the deaf, and Cohen’s own childhood, in a New York school for the deaf, where her father was superintendent.

For “Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things,” she reported from a New Brunswick logging operation, an Ohio glass factory, and a bean farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. Researching “The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Curtain of an American Community Theater,” she immersed herself in Arlington Friends of the Drama. And reporting for “Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight,” she revealed the lives of four Somerville girls in a boxing school, even putting on gloves to spar with them in the ring.

None of this was expected. “As a reader, I was never interested in nonfiction,” she said in an interview at her kitchen table. “I loved novels and short stories and poetry. I started when I was very little. I named my fingers, and they had personalities and dialogue and character. The elements of theater and narrative took hold of my imagination before I could write.”

She spent her first seven years, along with her family, living at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, where her father worked. She was exposed to American Sign Language there, and became fluent in adulthood. When she was 10, her family moved to Nyack, N.Y. She finished high school early, at 16, went to New York University intending to study drama, then transferred to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where she concentrated in writing and literature. After graduating in 1988, she worked for two years in New York as a sign language interpreter, and enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism, earning a master’s degree in 1991.

“I had a sense that if I were going to use writing to take on some social responsibility, journalism would be the logical way,” she said. She knew how to write but not how to research, report, and do interviews — “I had soft skills but not hard skills, so it was like boot camp.” However, she quickly realized she had no interest in being a reporter. “I thought, I will have a day job as a waitress or a sign language interpreter and write in the kitchen at night,” she said. But then a professor offered to show her writing to his agent, New York-based Barney Karpfinger. “He told me kindly and bluntly that he could work with me on a nonfiction project,” she said, “but didn’t see anything in my short stories that he could work with.”

Though she felt crushed at first, she decided he was right. “I was pretty good at executing sentences on the page,” she said, “but what was missing was a story worth telling.” She agreed to set aside fiction and try a book on the culture of the deaf, which became “Train Go Sorry,” a New York Times notable book for 1994. It’s still in print, and she still gets mail about it from readers.

“To my surprise,” she said, “I loved working on the nonfiction books. I don’t want to say I’m a shy person, but it’s an effort to go into a community where you’re a stranger, someone who is, culturally, nothing like the people whom you’re bugging. I had to push myself into these worlds where I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It’s been good for me.”

She moved to Somerville in the early 1990s, as she was starting “Train Go Sorry,” thinking Boston would be a good place for one interested in writing and the arts. When she was 27, she married a local man, and they had three children, now 11, 9, and 7. The marriage ended when the youngest child was about a year old. The children live with her and her boyfriend. “We’re a family of five,” she said. “I no longer think of myself as a single mother.”

In time, Karpfinger did agree to represent Cohen’s fiction, and her first novel, “Heat Lightning,” was published in 1997. The second, in 2003, was “Heart, You Bully, You Punk.” He has remained her agent, and while open to new nonfiction projects, now says, “I am encouraging her to stay with her fiction.” Cohen says that his encouragement was essential as she worked on “House Lights”: “I kept handing it in [to Karpfinger] and saying, ‘I think I’m close to the end,’ and he kept saying, ‘Don’t be afraid to be more ambitious.’ “

Demonstrating that agents sometimes function almost as editors, Karpfinger said in a telephone interview: “I encouraged her to be ambitious for herself, her characters, and her novel. Sometimes with a writer as talented and capable as Leah, you have to say, ‘Don’t you think you could do a bit more?’ “

Cohen says that all of her writing has a common theme: “that there are more substantial connections among us — acquaintances, strangers, close friends — than we are in the habit of noticing. With ‘Glass, Paper, Beans,’ I wanted to prove that the very glass I’m drinking out of links me to someone whose history is so full of experience common with mine.”

She has never made a lot of money, and says she might soon have to teach to help make ends meet. But she is not resentful at the writer’s lot. She spread her seven books out on her table and looked at them fondly, as if they were her children, too. “It’s such a great experience to make something, and these are about making something,” she said. “I feel so grateful as I get older. When I was younger, I had this sense of longing, a low-grade ache. In the past decade, I’ve come to understand that all that I longed for, I have. That almost simple-minded realization quietly changes all the colors in the room.”

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.