The ELI ( The English Language Institute) was the last thing I created that had any real meaning for me. It was the culmination of 20 plus years devoting my life to immigrants & foreign students and there were many battles fought in that war, a war I eventually lost, but not one I regret waging. There were many successes, and many people I helped toward a better life, but ultimately, like all those other campaigns I found myself on, those crusades that have taken up so much of my adult life, it left me worn out. I haven’t always known how to write about those years, just like I haven’t really written about the boy scouts in my fiction (just a piece of journalism that ended up in a textbook once a long, long time ago), only the bookstore was turned into an earlier novel that my agent couldn’t…