A little money, a little freedom allow everyday people to tell big stories of global relevance across cultures

Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007 | 1:49 a.m.

The author from Escanaba, Mich., steps into his UNLV office about 3 p.m. each day. Working at home in the mornings is preferable, Tom Bissell says, because there he can play "Halo 3" for an hour to treat bouts of writer's block.

Donna Hemans, a Jamaican-born novelist who occupies the next cubicle over, arrives in the morning. She often taps out two or three pages a day and hopes to finish her book - on a young Jamaican who travels to Cuba searching for long-lost relatives - by next year.

And Josip Novakovich, a Croatian native who works alongside Bissell and Hemans, begins his day with a double macchiato at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Maryland Parkway before heading to the office. When he gets antsy, he'll move on to the local Starbucks.

"We are not designed for the sedentary lifestyle," he says of humans. "I obey the animal in me. If the animal wants to move, I move."

The three inaugural fellows of UNLV's Black Mountain Institute are everyday people - an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, a former business journalist, a caffeine junkie who left Eastern Europe for American universities.

But these seemingly ordinary people have big stories to tell.

Black Mountain strives to bring literary voices into discussions on topics of global relevance such as immigration, and the institute's fellows do internationally focused writing that targets a lay audience. In picking fellows, institute staff looked at the quality of applicants' past work and how well their proposals fit with Black Mountain's mission. After narrowing the list to five candidates from dozens, the institute examined how well potential fellows' interests matched those of the donors who would be supporting them, Executive Director Carol Harter said.

Bissell, 33, is documenting his journeys to the supposed resting places of the 12 Apostles, including Judas Iscariot.

Novakovich, 51, is crafting two works of fiction - a murder novella set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a longer story following soldiers who fought in Central Europe during World War I.

In the fellows' writing is the idea that our worlds are larger than we often realize.

In his quest to learn more about the Apostles many know through Sunday school, Bissell has visited or will visit nine countries.

"I got caught in the middle of a riot between Palestinians and the Israeli security forces," Bissell said. "I spent a couple of wonderful days with a German priest in Trier. I went all over Greece tracing the supposed path of St. Andrew and met some wonderful Greek Orthodox priests who were just so delighted that someone was interested in their patron saint that they treated me like one of their family."

Bissell has earned critics' praise in the past for his travel writing, which includes books documenting his journey to Vietnam with his father, a Vietnam War veteran, and a trip to Uzbekistan to investigate environmental damage to the Aral Sea.

Hemans' work also tackles a familiar topic in an unusual way.

Whereas many authors write about the lives of immigrants in new countries, Hemans, 35, wants to tell the immigration story in a different way. Her first novel, "River Woman," examined the life of a woman left behind when her mother moved abroad.

Hemans' new project also investigates immigration's effect on people other than immigrants. The tale she hopes to tell is, in some ways, that of her past. Her grandparents left Jamaica to cut sugarcane in Cuba. Though they later returned to Jamaica, other family members remained in Cuba and lost touch with loved ones in Jamaica.

"My grandparents are dead and I don't really have their story," Hemans said.

"This book in particular, it's important for me to get it right because I'm trying to write my own family's history," said Hemans, who often visits Jamaica to see her parents.

Like Hemans, who moved to the United States to attend school 20 years ago, Novakovich is a person of two worlds. In 1976 he left Croatia (then Yugoslavia) to go to college in the United States. The 1990s Yugoslav wars, which turned Novakovich's mother into a refugee, kindled his interest in writing about that region and its surroundings.

"The war happened, and I had to understand it so I wrote nonfiction and fiction about the war," he said. "April Fool's Day," a Novakovich novel published in 2004, is a satirical account of life and war in the former Yugoslavia.

Internationally focused writing of the type Black Mountain promotes can help people understand cultures and histories of other countries, Novakovich said. U.S. schools often diversify reading lists by including American-born minority authors. That's good, but international voices are often missing from the curriculum, he said.

"If we had read about the regions that we wanted to bomb before bombing them, maybe we wouldn't be bombing them," Novakovich said.

The nine-month Black Mountain fellowships and the $50,000 they provide free Novakovich, Bissell and Hemans from many of life's distractions and responsibilities, giving them time to transform ideas into stories.

Bissell, a bachelor, was living near-broke in Rome when he applied for the Black Mountain fellowship. His acceptance was a relief, he said.

Hemans gladly left a technical editing job at a Virginia company to come to UNLV.And Novakovich took a break from teaching at Penn State. He is happy to have time to do little but read and write but fields frequent phone calls from his family, a wife and two children who live in Pennsylvania.

Novakovich spends his days reading up on World War I, stumbling upon historical oddities such as the story of a violinist whose hearing was so sharp he could identify the direction projectiles were coming from by the way they sang.

To write intelligibly about his travels, Bissell is learning about early Christian myths, imperial Roman history, Byzantine architecture and myriad other topics.

On Hemans' desk lie a Spanish-English dictionary and books on the cultures and labor histories of Cuba and Jamaica.

History is filled with tales epic and absurd. As are life and literature. And weaving the past together with their thoughts and experiences, Bissell, Hemans and Novakovich, everyday people, are crafting stories, building worlds.