Archive - August 2013

Letters from the Sixties: College, Peace Corps, Marriage by Jon C. Halter (Venezuela 1966-68) Self-published (available on Amazon.com) $9.99 308 pages 2013 Review by Barbara E. Joe (Honduras 2000-03) Having lived through the staid Fifties as they morphed into the tumultuous Sixties, I fully expected a wild ride, given the title of this book. Instead, these selected letters reveal a rather wholesome young man, Jon Halter, apparently a straight arrow throughout, someone whose most significant deviation from ordinary middle-class American life -and it did turn out to be significant-was joining the Peace Corps and marrying the Venezuelan sweetheart he met while in service. He is revealed as a conscientious son and faithful husband who saved his prolific college correspondence with his parents and, later, with his new wife, who was waiting alone in Venezuela for her visa to join him in the U.S. After the birth of their son, also . . .

Bonefish Bob: A Tribute by Bernard F. Blanche (Brazil 1965-67) Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co. $13.97 (paperback) 160 pages 2011 Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) This is a book for the passionate fisherman, one who longs to fish eternally. It is also a testament to the life of a man who took solace on water and relished the challenge, Bonefish Bob Berger. The author met Bonefish Bob in Islamorada, Florida in 2004, when his subject was 70 years old and only two years shy of suicide, a death that forces survivors to second guess whether they could have done more. In the author’s case, he decided to write about Bonefish Bob’s life. This is a delicate obituary, a tribute to a man whom the author admired. Robert Edward Berger was born in 1934. He grew up in York, Maine where he developed a keen love for fishing. . . .

To further fulfill its goals to encourage, recognize and promote Peace Corps writers, RPCV Writers & Readers, the newsletter that was the precursor of PeaceCorpsWriters.org and PeaceCorpsWorldwide.org, presented their first annual awards for outstanding writing in 1990. Awards have been given each year since then. When possible, they are presented at the RPCV Conference Awards Ceremony. The awards are: The Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award FIRST GIVEN IN 1990, the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award was named to honor Paul Cowan, a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Ecuador from 1966 to 1967. Cowan wrote The Making of An Un-American about his experiences as a Volunteer in Latin America in the ’60s. A longtime activist and political writer for The Village Voice, Cowan died of leukemia in 1988. The Maria Thomas Fiction Award THE MARIA THOMAS FICTION AWARD is named after the novelist Maria Thomas [Roberta Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73)] who was the . . .

Benediction, a new new novel by Kent Haruf, was published in March and I missed the pub date. Here is some information on the book. Benediction By Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965–67) Knopf $25.95 (hardcover), $15.00 (paperback), $12.99 (Kindle) 272 pages 2013 An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Kent Haruf writes about small towns and regular people, but don’t underestimate his ambition. He is writing about life, and to do that he has returned again and again–first with Plainsong, later with Eventide–to the small town of Holt, located on the eastern plains of Colorado. In Benediction, Haruf introduces us to Dad Lewis, a 77-year-old hardware store owner who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience of reading Haruf is a slow burn, but as we meet the people who gather around Dad Lewis in his final days we begin to see that this is a book . . .

John Coyne interviews Susan O’Neill about her new collection of essays Calling New Delhi for Free (and other ephemeral truths of the 21st century) that has just been published by Peace Corps Writers. • Susan, let’s begin with some basic stuff: what is your educational background? I earned an RN at a now-defunct three-year nursing school, Holy Cross School of Nursing, in South Bend, IN. I signed up for the Army while I was a student, so I could help my parents pay the bill with my monthly Army stipend, and afterward, the Army trained me in the Operating Room specialty. Then they sent me to Vietnam (the basis for my short story collection, Don’t Mean Nothing). After that I amassed a degree in Journalism, over 10 years, graduating at last in 1984 from at the U of Maine at Orono. o Where did you serve as a PCV? I . . .

New Madrid is the national journal of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University. It takes its name from the New Madrid seismic zone, which falls within the central Mississippi Valley and extends through western Kentucky. Between 1811 and 1812, four earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7.0 struck this region, changing the course of the Mississippi River, creating Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and ringing church bells as far away as Boston. The editor of the New Madrid Journal is Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79).  Ann is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of the book Easter Vigil, which earned the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and our RPCV Writers and Readers Award. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow as well as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She is also the winner of an Al Smith Fellowship from the . . .

Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1990-93) has won the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awards for Prose presented by the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Grassroots, SIUC’s undergraduate literary magazine. Mark won for his 2012 collection of stories, The Incurables (University of Notre Dame Press). Mark receives an honorarium of $1000, and will present a public reading and participate in panels at the Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The dates for the 2013 festival are October 16–18, 2013. Judges come from the faculty of SIUC’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and the award winners were selected by the staff of GRASSROOTS, SIUC’s undergraduate literary magazine. Mark directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He is the author of An American Affair, winner of the 2004 George Garrett Prize for fiction, as well as . . .

Jurors for the $50,000 St. Francis College Literary Prize have narrowed the more than 170 submissions down to a short list of five novels competing for the biannual award, one of the richest in the United States. The books and authors are: Carry the One (Simon & Schuster), by Carol Anshaw The Middlesteins (Grand Central Publishing), by Jami Attenberg Mule (Mariner Books), by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) The Right-Hand Shore (Picador), by Christopher Tilghman Dirt (Harper Perennial), by David Vann The winner will be announced at the opening gala for the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21. “It’s a prize that has no parallel really among existing literary prizes and comes at a perfect time in a writer’s career,” said Jonathan Dee, a member of the jury and winner of the second Literary Prize for his novel, The Privileges. “There’s a lot of attention when you make your debut. . . .