Archive - 2010

No one really wants to read about your Peace Corps experience. No one wants to hear your stories or see your photographs. So, get over it. We all know that three minutes into telling family and friends about our two years in the middle of nowhere that they stop listening. Their eyes roll. They yawn. This is the Tweet Decade. If it is longer than 30 words; it’s history. Okay, how do you tell the story of  your amazing life in the Third World as a PCV? You grab the reader by the throat. You begin your memoir as if it is a fast pace adventure story. You start with an opening line, an opening paragraph, that compels the reader to read the next sentence and the next. You write something like this: “My record was so bad (they sent the FBI to check up on you then) that I was first . . .

Anyone who decides to write a book soon realizes that the job requires three separate but equal skills: 1) You have to think of what to write; 2) You have to write the book; 3) You have to then go out and sell your book. # 3 is particularly true of anyone who self-publishes a novel or memoir. What writers soon realize is that no one wants to read their book! What writers have to realize is that just because you have written a book that doesn’t necessarily mean an audience is waiting to read it. There are famous stories of how successful authors were approached by new would-be writers and they’d say: “I’ll get you published, as long as I don’t have to read it.” That happened to William Faulkner, by the way. Sherwood Anderson got him published but didn’t read Faulkner’s first book. So don’t feel bad if no one reads . . .

Leita Kaldi Davis 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, and at the age of 55 became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal. She then went, for five years, to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti. She retired in Florida in 2002 and wrote a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert. Today, she  is working on a memoir of Haiti. Here is a essay she wrote about working in Haiti entitled, “Madame Victoire. • Madame Victoire by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) At the Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles where I worked from 1997 to 2002, every day I saw death bump up against life, perhaps most dramatically with Madame Victoire.  Pastor Jasmin told me about our Security Chief, Ivon Isme’s wife, Victoire, who had been ill for a long time.  . . .

The  publishing world is full of rejected books that went onto find a home and great success. Joe Heller’s Catch 22 was turned down 50 times by mainstream publishers. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers (the record!) and now has sold over 4 million copies. Also, remember, bad books also make best sellers. Take Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. It has sold millions. It is unreadable to anyone who reads English. Look at the Love Story by Erich Segal. Another huge bestseller. It’s a sappy, teenage love story written by a classics professor at Harvard. Segal wrote it as a movie script and the studio made into the first novelization ever done.  Remember The Bridges of Madison Country by Robert James Waller? It sold 50 million copies worldwide. Has anyone ever attempted to read James Patterson and the novels that are manufactured by his publishing factory? Then there is Nicholas Sparks who wrote . . .

The September issue of Vanity Fair carries a long article by Maureen Orth, special correspondent to the magazine, on designer Oleg Cassini. Journalist Orth has written articles for VF on Conrad Black, Michael Jackson, and Denise Rich, among others. Maureen says that she was ‘stunned’ by the “expanding cast of characters” she discovered while reporting “Cassini Royale.” Everyone is linked to the designer from financier Bernie Cornfeld to Geroge W. Bush. Maureen, in her other life, is the founder of the Marina Orth Foundation, a non-profit that serves underprivileged schools in Colombia. At the request of the secretary of education of Medellin, where Maureen was a PCV, she has developed a pilot program in English and Information Technology with teachers and students at the Marina Orth Rural School, a school of 350 students from kindergarten through high school. This program makes the Marina Orth school the first public bilingual school in the nation. It is . . .

Ron Schwarz (Colombia 1961-63) is an anthropologist who has been writing his Peace Corps story, Kennedy’s Orphans. Several years ago we met via the Internet when he took an on-line writing I was giving on ‘writing your Peace Corps memoir.’ This opening chapter was recently published in the Brooklyn Eagle. • From Kings Highway to Colombia By Ron Schwarz (Colombia 1961–63) BROOKLYN – June 8, 1961 . . . my mother answered the call. I’m playing tennis with Dickie Cowan on center court at Forest Hills where the U.S. Open was staged until 1978. It was not an officially sanctioned match and our access to the grounds was due neither to club membership, nor a USLTA ranking. Rather, it was an ancillary benefit of our first paid job after graduating from Colgate and Harvard … painting seat numbers on the wooden stadium benches. Match over and outside the stadium, Dickie, . . .

Years ago when I was an undergraduate in the Writers Institute at Saint Louis University I had a wonderful creative writing professor who taught me what publishing and the world of literature was all about. He told us then–and there were twenty-five of us would-be novelists in this freshman class–that what we write would be judged by him, not against the person in the next desk, but against the whole cannon of literature. “You want to write and be read?” he said. “Well this is your competition, these are the great writers of the world. They are the standards I use to evaluate your prose.” And then he pointed to a bookshelf of the greatest books in the world. Well, I never did very well against the Great Writers of Western Civilization, but occasionally he would nod approvingly over a sentence of mine, or the way I used a metaphor, and . . .

When Faulkner finished A Fable ( his 17th book) he brought it to New York and to his editor Bennett Cerf at Random House. Cerf read the novel and put Faulkner in an office and told him to rewrite it. When Thomas Wolfe was writing his novels in his New York apartment, his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, knocked on the door, came in, took the manuscript away from Wolfe and told him, “you’re done now, Tom” and went off and edited Wolfe’s pages into a publishable book. The reason for a publisher is the editing talent that they bring to a manuscript. These editing skills are not generally available to most self-published writers. Yes, a few RPCV writers have gone out of their way and hired editors, mostly for copy editing, not line editing, or editing for content. These are three different types of editing: 1) content; 2) line editing; 3) copy editing. It is rare that you . . .

You might have read in the New York Times  last week (Thursday, August 12, 2010) how Pete Hamill is publishing his next book They Are Us, about immigration in the United States but not in print. No, his publisher is going  straight-to an e-book. In the same day’s Times, this in the business section, had an article on Barnes & Noble, how they are retooling to stay relevant as e-books take off. According to the Association of American Publishers in the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period of 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcovers, grew to 8.5 percent. All of this is because of the new Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, and the Nook devices. What does this mean? Well, Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says that e-books make up about . . .