Jeffrey Taylor (Morocco 1988-90; PC Staff/Poland 1992, Uzbekistan 1992-93) book Murderers in Mausoleums was picked as one of the best books of 2009 by Travel Channel’s Worldhum.com.

Bob Hoover, book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has just picked the Best Books of  2009. On the short (10 books only) non-fiction list is Soul of A People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America” by David A. Taylor (Mauritania 1983–85).  Quoting Hoover in his selection, “This 1930s version of a stimulus package reinvigorated a starving artist class in America with jobs for out-of-work writers. The results, while uneven, were remarkable. Taylor provides a basic history of this project.”   Nicely done, David!

Read our review of the book at: http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers/2009/09/28/rpcv-taylors/

 

The Sun–a very fine small magazine published by Sy Safransky in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that you should read (and could write for) just published (January 2010) a short piece by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97)  in their Sunbeams column, which is the back page of the publication. Sunbeams are short items that shed light on a particular topic.

Bissell has a comment on the Environment. Tom writes: Environmentalism suddenly struck me as the most obvious philosophy imaginable: Let us not ruin forever where we live and work and breathe and eat. Earth’s future inhabitants will no doubt look upon our current environmental practices–maintained despite all manner of evidence that doing so will result in  planetary ruin–roughly the way we look upon eighteenth-century surgery. And that is if we, and they, are very lucky.”

Tom is now teaching creative writing at Portland State (if you are looking for a writing class to take) and you can take a look (and buy) Sun Magazine at www.thesunmagazine.org.

Reviewer Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, for Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University. She worked with Roma (Gypsies) for fifteen years, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal at the age of fifty-five, then went on to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti for five years. She retired in Florida in 2002. She has written a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert, and is working on a memoir of Haiti.

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What the Abenaki Say About Dogs, and other poems and stories of Lake Champlain
by Dan Close (Ethiopia 1964–66)
53 pages
Tamarac Press
$10.00
2009

Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96)

Dan Close met a group of Abenaki Indians sifting through a yellow loader filled with sand, looking for their ancestors’ bones. Someone was building a “new house by the river” and the Abenaki were awaiting a court order to stop the desecration of their ancient burial site. “These bones have rights beyond the laws of men,” Close writes in his poem, “Sifters,” a poem that came to him spontaneously after witnessing their patient harvesting of what lay under the land.

In his poems and stories Close chooses simple, perfect words that portray vivid images of the “People of the Dawn” and Lake Champlain, “The Sea Between.” Birds sing, waves splash, the wild loon sings. And then an unexpected irony jars the reader like a hypnotist snapping his fingers. “What the Abenaki Say About Dogs” is an idyllic stroll to the beyond that suddenly becomes a bridge to hell.

Beyond the daily glories of nature, however, imagination reigns, as in Close’s story about “The Bold McGregor,” an aged widower who gazes out upon the lake at midnight and sees its whole history: Indians of many tribes gliding in canoes, first a few, then hundreds, then the French bearing down with muskets, a British fleet, then American ships, conflagrations on the shores where a quiet bonfire once glowed.

Close slips into the mind set of an Abenaki as if he were remembering a previous lifetime. He writes about thundering gods on the mountaintops and Maquan, the woman who breathes life into everything. He strikes me as a mystic whose interests include “…the origins and futures of the universe.” He may well be living in the right place to understand such mysteries.

I spent a quiet afternoon reading Dan Close’s poems and stories and felt, upon closing the book, as if I were coming out of a trance. I was reminded once again how poetry raises your consciousness, lifts your spirit and makes you wonder why, as Moliere’s “Bourgeois Gentleman” says, we spend our lives speaking prose.

Reviewer Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing (fiction, poetry, personal essay, freshman comp) at the University of Michigan - Flint. Her Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, was a top-ten finalist in literary fiction in the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year awards. Her most recent publication, “Ordinary Dirt,” was part of a Driftwood Review special issue featuring poems of exactly 100 words.  Her work in multiple genres has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press, and many literary magazines.  She commutes between Flint and Los Angeles with her husband, Ted, who’s also an RPCV (Turkey 1964–66). She took time out to review Larry Kimport’s novel At the Table of Want that was published in October. Here’s what she had to say.

At the Table of Want
by Larry Kimport (Malaysia 1980-82)
October, 2009
338 pages
$16.97

Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976–78)

Like Larry Kimport, I’m a self-published novelist. In the bitter wake of the failure of my book to sell through the New York agent I clung to for an exciting six months, I loudly decried the need for those East Coast blue stockings altogether. To hell with agents, to hell with editors, I muttered in the disheartening collapse of my mainstream hopes.

But reading Kimport’s second novel, At the Table of Want, I found myself thinking, If only he’d had an editor with an eye for syntactical speed bumps and distracting tics of diction. I had an extremely difficult time getting through the first three pages, beginning with this opening:

“Young Truman shifted in his seat, rehearsing bullying and clubbing his way through the family occupying the seats before his own, should the need arise.”

Please!  How can a reader build momentum on that potholed road, all that “ing-ing” complicated by the confusing and quaint “before,” that hair-pin turn to the subjunctive after-thought? It’s an opening as convoluted as a colonoscopy; readers deserve better.

Throughout, Kimport uses “amongst,”  “upon,”  “spoke of,”  “wondered of” and similar antique phrases repeatedly, making his main character sound more like he was born in 1921 than 1961.  These choices needlessly burden the flow:

“At five months, the scar upon the lawn of monuments stood out amongst two others, both adorned with flowers.”

But I plodded onward, hoping for smoother passage later.  Finally, in much the same way as one adapts to trifocal progressive lenses, my brain gradually adjusted to Kimport’s often-stilted style and I found things to admire.

The story, a familiar kind of Peace Corps “coming of age” tale, sets Truman at 18, fresh out of high school, in the steamy Malaysia of Kimport’s own 1980s Peace Corps service.  Without a clear job assignment, he carves out his own, drawn to a rundown home for abandoned “special needs” kids.  He has no training but finds the raggedy crew of Downs Syndrome, deformed, autistic and downright crazy children irresistible.  He moves into a shed behind the ramshackle depository, and cleans the place up, burning trash, painting, building furniture. Then he organizes a “school,” teaching them numbers, the alphabet, and how to play with toys.

Here’s a suspension of disbelief alert.  I checked with John Coyne to be sure:  back then and now, no 18-year-old without college or job experience would be admitted into Peace Corps — you have to have a college degree or five years’ experience.

But in the plot Kimport delivers, his guy needed to be naïve, in the way many of us will remember certain Volunteers, because the story rests in part on his cluelessness about women and his hunger for experience.  We learn that not only is he “the V word,” but he has never even been kissed.  He has never read a book all the way through, never knew his father;  he was orphaned at nine, thrown in with an aunt who loved him.  The kid has secrets and scars both real and emotional - we find out, for example, he was tossed into reform school for a year after beating up a bully with a baseball bat.

(Coyne affirms there’s a believability issue here, as well — as a long-time former recruiter, he says he never would have admitted a kid with a violent past, even if in understandable retribution. This is Fact Strike Two  — it’s true a writer shouldn’t let the “truth” interfere with a good story,” but violating certain details hurts credibility and leaves the wrong impression.)

Again, though, justifiable or not, Kimport is exercising character-driven plot technique.  There’s a reason for us to know about Truman’s violent past: in the story’s climax, he wields a heavy cane to save the day and rescue the damsel in distress.  That’s only after he’s COS’ed , fortunately, so we rest in the knowledge that he was not a PCV when cracking skulls in a Malaysian back alley.

Not surprisingly to any RPCV, there’s a lot of drinking, cussing and partying in Truman’s life, especially after he makes friends with the only other American in his village, the amusing John Singer.  He’s another familiar Peace Corps type — a cynical, brawling alcoholic with a romantic heart.

As Truman “succeeds” in his mission, battling snakes, filth, disease, discrimination and philistine bureaucracy as a “Pied Piper of the youthful lame,” he becomes a sympathetic character, and readers, especially RPCVs, are likely to acknowledge with appreciation his gradual ripening into maturity and the unconventional contributions he ultimately makes at his little “table of want.”

Bryant Wieneke is an assistant dean at a California university and has self published several novels. The latest, The Mission Priority, is the third in that series. A fourth will soon be published and a fifth is now being written. “It became a vehicle,” says Wieneke. ”The two main characters have opposite foreign policy objectives.”  This latest book is reviewed by the intellectual tag-team of Lawrence Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) and his son, Ezequiel. The first in this series by Wieneke, Priority One, was reviewed in 2005 on Peace Corps  Writers by David Gurr (Ethiopia 1962–64).

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The Mission Priority
by Bryant Wieneke
Peace Rose Publishing
2009
335 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Lawrence  (Honduras 1975–77) and Ezequiel Lihosit

Do you miss the Bush era colored coded paranoia? I sure do. That was even better than building fallout shelters during the 1960’s. I only wish they had introduced some kind of anti-terrorist uniform with cool patches, maybe a Youth Bush League. Yellow today but maybe orange tomorrow! Go buy that plastic and duct-tape right now and start taping up your house. Forget the reality that nerve gas is absorbed through your skin, not necessarily breathed in. As Country Joe McDonald proclaimed, “Ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee! We’re all goin’ ta die.”

For us nostalgic old coots, there are books. Bryan Wieneke has written a political suspense book like a modern day Robert Ludlum for lovers of suspenseful political thrillers. He spins an elaborate espionage tale that forces the reader to turn pages. Set in Southern California, the reader understands that terrorism has come home. Like Ludlum novels, a pair of American crusaders fights evil.

This is the third in a series featuring the protagonist Kendall Smith. Set in the present day, Smith and two other agents are assigned to the Riverside Hotel for anti-terrorism security after a Presidential debate. Kendall Smith, an accessible and everyday character, works for the Department of Homeland Security, yet he is not a typical soldier type. Wieneke’s own experiences in the Peace Corps helped shape the main character’s special view on foreign policy and his search for diplomatic solutions.

Kendall, his partners Jason Perez and his Perez’s wife Allison search the Riverside hotel, site of a big Republican donor dinner after the Presidential debate. They also follow up any leads that suggest the involvement of the terrorist organization, Serpent Cracheur. The search for clues is meticulous and like Ludlum’s famous detail, enthralls the reader. Kendall (no expert in surveillance or anti-terror procedures) has an intimate knowledge of the organization due to his African work.

What Smith lacks is information from his boss. Kendall resents his boss and the two butt heads over everything from strategies to dinner choices but Allison mediates. After Perez’s intuition proves correct, Kendall learns to respect his rival. Kendall feels the pressure to uncover any bomb or plot since he and Allison are the hotel protection until the secret service arrives. After Perez gets a tip about some people living in an abandoned house, the team learns that the Serpent Cracheur is active near the hotel’s site and they have left a message. From then on, the team works with a frenzied passion to search every window, drawer, and crevice to stop terrorism before it interrupts our own Presidential Debate.

The heart of the novel is a foreign policy clash. Jason Perez, presents the no frills, bombs away approach. He believes in the Allen Dulles view that the United States needs to use force to protect “legitimate business interests.” Kendall feels that the United States foreign policy is “unnecessarily violent and he did not want to be a part of it. He believed in a non-violent approach.” These two manners of diplomacy have been argued for decades, yet the military usually prevails.

Though Serpent Cracheur attempted to kill Kendall at the end of the last book (Santa Barbara Priority), he understands their plight with oil companies. He does not agree with terrorism but having worked in Africa he cannot eliminate the target. What Wieneke infers is that one’s life experiences differently shape someone’s reaction. His time in Africa inspired a different foreign policy for poverty and disease made him question capitalism.

I suspect that Bushites appreciate this venue: right and wrong, for us or against us. While great literature is supposed to present struggles between good and evil, wrapping those terms around empire politics is somehow reminiscent of The Little Prince. Much like sleight of hand, the reader is soon marching, lock step, towards Fatherland security. You can almost hear hard-nailed boots clicking and stiff leather jackets crinkling.

Ezequiel K. Lihosit is a former newspaper editor and author of Essays and Stories. Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) is the author of several books. His latest, Whispering Campaign; Stories from Mesoamerica, is available on Amazon.com.

Reviewer Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) is an anthropologist, writer and former magazine editor. Besides numerous articles, he has published five books including two biographies, Against the Current: The Life of Lain Singh Bangdel-Writer, Painter and Art Historian of Nepal (Orchid Press 2004), and Moran of Kathmandu: Priest, Educator and Ham Radio ‘Voice of the Himalayas’ (Orchid Press, 1997; rev. ed. in press, 2010). His next book, Discovering the Big Dogs of Tibet and the Himalayas (in press, 2010), combines memoir and essay; and an anthology of his creative nonfiction is forthcoming. Don writes from his home near Portland, Oregon, when he’s not off leading treks in the Himalayas.

Mosquito Conversations
More Stories from the Upper Peninsula
by Lauri Anderson (Nigeria 1965-67)
North Star Press
$14.95
139 pages
July 2009

Reviewed by Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65)

If ever there was a culture within a culture, it’s on Michigan’s “U.P.”, the Upper Peninsula. The U.P. is cut off from the rest of Michigan by three Great Lakes and on a map it appears to hang down from the Canada border like a forgotten appendage. Aside from timber, some old mines, a little agriculture and a few goat farms and dog kennels, what else does it boast? A sizable and proud population of Finns for one, and Finlandia University where the author teaches English. It takes an insider to write well about the U.P. and the Finns. Lauri Anderson is an insider.

So far, Anderson has published eight books, three of them in his current series: Misery Bay, Back to Misery Bay, and now Mosquito Conversations: More Stories from the Upper Peninsula. Misery Bay is real, and so is the Mosquito Inn Bar where some of the conversations take place. His books are fiction, though some of his stories and vignettes sound autobiographical, and that’s what makes them so alluring. The author’s politics also bleed through in a conversational critique of the Bush era, aptly entitled ‘Contradictions’.

Not all of the stories take place in the U.P., however. Some are in Maine, and sometimes (secretly, the author tells me) he’s taken characters from Maine and placed them in Michigan, “including non-Finns that I transform a bit,” he says. One story called ‘Joe Heinonen’ even reflects Anderson’s world travels, including a scene flying into Kathmandu with an elderly American tourist couple, upset because mountainous Nepal is not flat enough for proper development!

“I like to think that my characters are universal and that anyone of any background can enjoy their lives in spite of their Finnishness,” Lauri wrote when I asked him about his writing. In all the books, he says, “I try to mix seamlessly real events in real lives with pure fiction (and) with journalism. I’m striving for a kind of super-realism.”

He lists Flannery O’Connor, Marguerite Duras, Clark Blaise, Juan Rulfo, Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, and Malcolm Lowry as his literary influences.

Misery Conversations has 11 chapters with titles like ‘Patsy’, ‘Dirt’, ‘Trip’, ‘Dad’, ‘Veikko and Elvi’, and ‘Heikki’s Resume.’ The chapter with the longest title serves to explain most of the  book-’From the Mosquito Inn Bar on a Saturday Night in 2009: Pieces of Conversation, Mini-scenes’. Some are pure country wit:

“He’d've made a good fence post in a back field of an abandoned farm at the end of a dead-end side road off a secondary road somewhere in Misery Bay. And that wife of his? She’d've made a good bird sitting on it.”

“‘Let’s have a drink together,’ I said but the old man was dead. It was the only time the old guy had ever turned down a drink.”

A short story called ‘Reino’ is the closest to autobiographical self-reflection. One day there came a phone call:

“‘Hey, professor. It’s Reino…’”

“Reino was a talker. I let him go on while I watched the Packers on TV. They were losing…

“Reino’s voice rambled on. ‘You should have consulted me, buddy, before you wrote your second book. That’s the real reason I called — to tell you that. The people over here don’t like that second Misery Bay book. They say they aren’t like that. They say you got it all wrong’…

“‘My book has virtually nothing to do with the real people who live in Misery Bay,’ I said. ‘I just like the name of the place, its extreme isolation, and its profound beauty. In the first Misery Bay book, I wanted to examine the effects of geographic isolation on character… In the second Misery Bay book, I wanted to see what happens when characters carry an isolated piece of geography inside them after they move to Los Angeles or Chicago or Tampa.’”

And in the third? Anderson doesn’t say; but given his insight into the American psyche I recommend Mosquito Conversations as a literary romp through a fascinating part (mostly) of the rural outback.

Cynthia Morrison Phoel ( Bulgaria 1994-96) was a PCV in a Bulgarian town not unlike the one in her new collection, Cold Snap. Her book will be published this spring (April) by Southern Methodist University Press. Cynthia holds degrees from Cornell and the Warrren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and her short stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, and Harvard Review. She lives near Boston and just gave birth to her third child! Busy RPCV.

The book is getting some great advance word, and great blubs from writers like Steve Yarbrough, Alison Lurie, Katherine Shonk, Robert Boswell, Robert Cohen, etc.

While the Peace Corps ‘volunteer’ is not part of her stories, actually there is only one American in the stories, this collection of stories, now a book, shows what an RPCV can do with the experience. As Alison Lurie writes, “I admire Cynthia Phoel’s use of original material, and the skill with which she makes an unfamiliar world real.”

SMU press, by the way, also published Paul Eggers (Malaysia 1976-78) who won our Marie Thomas Fiction Award in 2000 for his novel Saviors, set in a Vietnamese refugee camp on an island called Bidong off the east coast of Malaysia in the late 1970s, and the novel The Baker’s Boy by  Barry Kitterman (Belize 1975-77) that won the same award this year.

Reviewer Allen W. Fletcher (Senegal 1969-71) is a publisher in Worcester, Massachusetts and recently published a memoir of his Peace Corps service in Senegal, entitled Heat, Sand and Friends. Here he looks at another book spawned by the cross-cultural experience.

Whispering Campaign: Stories from Mesoamerica
by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77)
iUniverse, Inc.
$11.95
120 pages
November, 2009

 

Lawrence Lihosit is an inveterate self-publisher, has served us up a pungent and tasty array of stories in his Whispering Campaign - Stories from Mesoamerica. They have the allure of Mexican street food — rough and honest and earthy. They are laced with the complementary spices of cross-cultural compassion and gringo guilt; and they go directly to the gut.

Lihosit spent a total of seven and a half years in Mexico and Central America, and from the feel of it, it was not a touristic enterprise. By his own account he grew close enough to the people of the several countries in which he lived to tip toe on the dangerous side of local politics. There is no question where his feelings fall with respect to repressive regimes and North American interference in Latin American affairs. There are not a lot of sympathetic norte americanos to be found here.

Lihosit wrote these stories some 25 years ago and recently decided to stir them up again. He adopted a personal conceit of modeling each after the work of a famous author, ranging from Faulkner to Garcia Marques — not a modus operandi that would likely lead to consistency of style; and truth be told, the stew is a little lumpy. The mix is a rich one, however. The reader may choose to engage in his or her own literary guessing game — and it’s there for the playing — but the reward here is in the guts of the stories, not in the stylistic artifice. Each one — and they range from 6 to 68 pages — describes a human involvement that is inextricably bi-cultural and convincingly grounded in its locale.

A trio of protestistas take a harrowing night-time car ride in support of a disintegrating popular cause. A naïve norteno achieves unintended and treacherous results with his academic game-playing.  An island woodcarver is seduced away from his art by visitors and has to find his own, elegiac way back to his source. A failed salesman’s son works out his own expiation through a sequence of tawdry encounters south of the border.  These stories and their companions conjure up a rough world where damage is an inevitable byproduct of cross-cultural dalliance. As in Chinatown or Ballad of a Thin Man, what is happening here is seldom either intended or fully understood.

The stories are fiction, Lihosit is careful to explain in his preface, yet they have the unmistakable flavor of authenticity. His writing clearly springs from personal familiarity and observation; and his attitude is clearly grounded in personal experience. The cumulative effect is not an optimistic one; and yet Lihosit ends the collection gently, on a note of rebirth and hope. And with this choice he seems to achieve his own writer’s redemption from the full weight of his subject matter.

Allen W. Fletcher’s memoir of Senegal  Heat, Sand and  Friends is available by emailing him at afletcher@worcesterpublishing.com.