Archive - 2010

1
Review Of Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96)
2
Peace Corps At Day One, # 9
3
Review of RPCV Jesse Lonergan's Joe and Azat
4
Peace Corps At Day One, # 8
5
100 Days (Or Less) Part Ten: Day Five
6
Peace Corps At Day One, # 7
7
Peace Corps At Day One, # 6
8
100 Days (Or Less) Part Nine: Day Four
9
Peace Corps At Day One, # 5
10
Major RPCV Writers Publishing Books In February
11
RPCV Hessler Completes Chinese Trilogy
12
100 Days (Or Less) Part Eight: Day Three
13
Peace Corps At Day One, # 4
14
100 Days (Or Less) Part Seven: Day Two
15
Peace Corps At Day One, # 3

Review Of Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96)

Reviewer Mark Brazaitis is the author of three books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel that won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Writers. His latest book is The Other Language: Poems, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Witness, Notre Dame Review, Confrontation, and elsewhere. • Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories by Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994–96) Southern Methodist University Press June 2010 208 pages $22.50 Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991–93) Good fiction works from the inside out. Yes, The Sun Also Rises is a novel about post-World War I Paris, with a little Spanish bullfighting thrown in, but it’s essentially and vividly the story of a man (Jake Barnes) who loves a woman (Lady Brett Ashley) who . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 9

The only RPCV book that focuses exclusively on Peace Corps Training–that I know about– is Alan Weiss’ (Nigeria 1963-64) High Risk/High Gain published in 1968 by St. Martin’s Press. It is Alan’s account of  training at Columbia University in the summer of 1963. It is a funny, outrageous, and a sad book.  In his book, Alan focuses on the elaborate system  ‘someone’ at the Peace Corps had created, a series of rating from High Risk/Low Gain to Low Risk/High Gain. All of the PCVs in those early years was so graded in our Peace Corps Training report card. A year after my tour in Ethiopia I returned to Addis Ababa as an APCD. In the office files, in the old Point Four building, I discovered in a bottom file cabinet drawer a copy of how the psychologists back in Georgetown Training had evaluated all of us, the first PCVs to Ethiopia. I went down the long list of some 275 PCVs and found my name and my rating. . . .

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Review of RPCV Jesse Lonergan's Joe and Azat

Born in Manhattan, reviewer Ian Kreisberg is older than MTV but younger than Etch-A-Sketch, making him contemporary with Lite-Brite. Like his contemporary, Ian exists to entertain others; a skill he has been honing for over 2 decades. Ian is a calligrapher, graphic designer, comedian, and amateur maker of comics. He lectures on the subject of comics as a medium at colleges and art galleries. While he has never been in the  Peace Corps, his best friends have! And to prove that he could be a PCV, he spends time with friends, plays punk ukulele, reads comics, and tries desperately to keep track of his ideas. To get him ready  to serve, I asked if he would review Jesse Lonergan’s (Turkmenistan 2005-07) graphic novel. • Joe and Azat by Jesse Lonergan (Turkmenistan 2005–07) ComicsLit, November 2009 95 pages $10.95 Reviewed by Ian Kreisberg Before I praise Jesse Lonergan for the use . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 8

Early training for the Peace Corps–this was in 1961–was on college campuses like the University of Michigan, but for some Trainees it also meant “field training” in Puerto Rico, the Rocky Mountains, and other locations. The first Puerto Rico site ws located in the mountains south of Arecibo. This training came about, or so it seems, because Shriver in February and March of ’61 reviewed the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VOS) program. These schools exposed their student to unexpected challenges and the students were judged by how well they reacted to new situations. This method, I understand, was developed during World War II and was later adopted by the British industry as a technique for training potential leaders. Shriver got in touch with the Outward Bound Trust, governing body of the schools, and got the help of two of their members, Sir Spencer Summers, chairman of the Trust, and Captain Frederick Fuller, Headmaster of the oldest Outward Bound . . .

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100 Days (Or Less) Part Ten: Day Five

Day Five You can never know enough about your characters. W. Somerset Maugham Get a stack of 5 X 7 cards and put each character’s name at the top on a card. Next, think about the role each plays in your story, and what kind of person each is: age, education, place of birth, hot-headed, funny, fat, ugly. What are their quirks? Do they wash their hands 500 times a day? Do they hear voices? Are they kind to kids but love to torture cats? Do they have a favorite expression or phrase that they say over and over again?  Put it down, put down so much that you finally come to know these characters intimately. Alfred Hitchcock would write down the scenes of his movies on index cards, one scene to a card. That way, as he said, by the time he was ready to shoot the film, he . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 7

Training I Ordinary Americans had rarely been trained systematically for service overseas. As assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland pointed out in his study, “The Overseas American,” attempts at orienting Americans to overseas service had usually been casual and totally inadequatee. As a result many Americans living abroad, whether privately or as officials, had not had a real understanding of the society in which they found themselves. Fewer still had learned the local language. These were the errors the Peace Corps resolved to avoid when they began Peace Corps Training in the summer of 1961. When the Peace Corps was established on March 1, there were few guidelines on how to train PCV effectively for service in the Third World. Faced with this dearth of precedents, Associate Director Larry Dennis sponsored a series of Peace Corps Institutes which brought people together from Government agencies, universities, foundations, business, labor and professional and . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 6

SELECTION II The test battery was only one phase of the selection process. Selection began when an applicant filled out the questionnaire and returned it to the Peace Corps. This process of volunteering represented a kind of “self-selection” and it was in no small part responsible, or so Peace Corps/Washington thought, “for the generally high calibre of Peace Corps applicants in those early days.” Further “self-selection” occurred when and applicant was offered an invitation to train for a specific project and was free to accept or decline the invitation. Potential Volunteers listed various references on the questionnaire and they were contacted. What was learned (and this surprised the Peace Corps selection staff) was that the attention paid to the recommendations by referents provided a “valuable tool for selection.” [In later years, when doing studies on how ‘successful’ PCVs were overseas, the Peace Corps found that the evaluations by PCV’s mothers proved to be the most accurate of all on . . .

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100 Days (Or Less) Part Nine: Day Four

Day Four Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created-nothing.  F. Scott Fitzgerald For the novel that you are writing pick your characters first, as they are harder to pick than a story. In his book on writing the legendary book editor Thomas McCormack writes, “There is no doubt in my mind that the choice of the cast of characters is the most important decision the novelist makes, and that the choice cannot be optimally informed without attention to how they plug into one another, their circuitry.” When writing, the plot may or may not change, but the characters will develop and have lives of their own. As your characters develop, they’ll take on distinct personalities, and as with good friends, you’ll know in certain situations what they will or will not do. Mystery . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 5

Selection [PCVs today fill out applications for the Peace Corps, mostly on-line, and have a quick one hour interview, in person or by phone. with a recruiter; they supply a list of 4 references, and take a physical examination and that is how they get into the Peace Corps. Today’s PCVs have no idea of the elaborate selection process that took place in the early days of the agency. Here is a brief summary (over the next few days) of what happened in D.C. (and across the country) to select and train the first generation of Peace Corps Volunteers.] In March 1961, in developing a way to find the right Volunteers for the right job, there was no margin for error, or so they thought at Peace Corps HQ in the old Maiatico Building. The Peace Corps, at the time, was a  highly visible, well reported operation of the government. A considerable body of public opinion was already . . .

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Major RPCV Writers Publishing Books In February

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler (China 1996–98) Harper’s 448 pages February 2010 $27.99 • Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso 1975–77) Pocket 368 pages February 2010 $15.00 • Poison of Love: Are We Frying Our Children’s Brains (novel) by Ruth Moss (Kazakhstan 1996–98) Eloquent Books 250 pages January 2010 $14.95 • A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Paul Theroux (Malawai 1963–65) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages February 2010 $26.00 • Tiptoe Through the Tombstones: Oakhill Cemetery, Vol. 1 by Ghlee E. Woodworth (Comoros Islands 1991–93); edited by Jane Uscilka Self-Published 240 pages July 2009 $35.00

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RPCV Hessler Completes Chinese Trilogy

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory is Peter Hessler’s (China 1996-98) third book on his host Peace Corps country. It is being published on Tuesday, February 9. Peter, who went to China first as a Rhodes Scholar, then returned as a PCV, has lived on and off, mostly on, in China for over a decade. In the summer of 2001 he acquired a Chinese driver’s license and took his first road trip across the north of the country, following the route of the Great Wall and camping along the way. Peter made two such journeys, one in the spring and one in the autumn; he traveled over 7,436 miles and went all the way to the Tibetan Plateau. The second part of the book is focus on a family north of Beijing that has shifted from farming to business after their local road is paved. The third section . . .

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100 Days (Or Less) Part Eight: Day Three

Day Three  Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.  Mark Twain Most novels are written to a formula, especially big best sellers. For example, John Baldwin, co-author of The Eleventh Plague: A Novel of Medical Terror, developed a simple formula that he used to structure his novel.           His ten-step formula is: 1. The hero is an expert. 2. The villain is an expert. 3. You must watch all of the villainy over the shoulder of the villain. 4. The hero has a team of experts in various fields behind him. 5. Two or more on the team must fall in love. 6. Two or more on the team must die. 7. The villain must turn his attention from his initial goal to the team. 8. The villain and the hero must live to do battle again in the sequel. 9. All deaths . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 4

In the very early days of 1961, the experts had concluded that a Peace Corps of 300 to 500 Volunteers would be a realistic and worthwhile pilot program. The estimate was revised when Shriver and a Peace Corps “team” (then Presidential Assistant Harris Wofford and Peace Corps Assistant Franklin H. Williams and Edwin Bayley, among others) returned from a trip to Africa and Asia in May of 1961. Requests from world leaders for Peace Corps Volunteers, plus demonstrated interest at home, led to a revised estimate of 500 to 1,000 Volunteers by December 31, 1961, and 2,400 by June 30, 1962, the end of the Peace Corps’s first fiscal year. The governments of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanganyika, India, Pakistan, Malaya, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, St. Lucia and the Philippines were the first to request Volunteers. These requests covered much of what, in the first years, had come to be considered the Peace Corps . . .

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100 Days (Or Less) Part Seven: Day Two

Day Two It’s very excruciating life facing that piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them. Truman Capote In the first week, you will decide the story you are going to tell. My guess is that you have been thinking of your story for quite some time. It is the book you have always wanted to write. It doesn’t matter what kind of novel or memoir you write. There are no rules other than that the book has to be interesting. It can be exciting, scary, fun, funny, romantic, sad, or true down to the very last word – but it must not bore the reader. You will not know every detail of your book, or even how it ends, but today you are going to begin the process of finding out. You are not going to . . .

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Peace Corps At Day One, # 3

According to the 1st Annual Report to Congress for the Fiscal Year that ended on June 30, 1962 there were 7 major problems facing the Peace Corps in March 1961, the day President Kennedy signed the Executive Order establishing the agency.   1) Were there enough qualified and talented Americans willing to respond to the Peace Corps invitation to service? 2) Would foreign governments request these Volunteers to fill their middle-level manpower needs? 3) Could the right Volunteers be selected? 4) Could they be adequately trained to avoid the pitfalls of Americans who had failed overseas before? 5) Would they have the stamina to stay on the job? 6) Could the Peace Corps undertake its mission independently or would it be entangled in existing red tape? 7) Would Congress approve the Corps at all, an even if it did, would enough money be appropriate for a new world-wide undertaking involving thousands . . .

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