Archive - 2013

Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) editor of Gallery Cat published this funny and true piece this afternoon, a commencement address by Neil Gaimen. Read the introduction by Jason and then watch the short video, do so if you are interested in writing, the arts, or just doing good for the world. In May, HarperCollins will publish Make Good Art, a Chip Kidd-designed book version of a Neil Gaiman commencement address. Gaiman’s speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia went viral last year, sharing “secret freelancer knowledge” that all kinds of writers, editors and freelance workers can use. We’ve embedded a video of his speech above-it also contains the best advice he ever received, delivered by the great novelist Stephen King. Here is Gaiman’s secret freelancer knowledge: You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of today’s world is . . .

Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965-67) is out with the fifth book in his cycle of novels set in the high plains of Colorado. Knopf has just published Benediction, and it is reviewed in the Sunday March 10, 2013, Book Section of The New York Times. Kent’s earlier, best-selling novels about this close-knit community–Holt, Colorado–are The Tie That Binds, Where You Once Belonged, Plainsong and Eventide. The plot is summed up this way: When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them. Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the . . .

This is from “Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie” an online journal about memoir. Melissa Shook is the editor. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) Interview by Melissa Shook I’ve read Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s ambitious and skillfully crafted memoir, Girls of Tender Age, three times. Forty-seven chapters of varying lengths, 275 pages, crammed with divergent, interweaving stories located  in a neighborhood where “you eat guinea food, drink harp beer, ostracize the frogs (since, as the most recent immigrants, they are at the bottom of the pecking order)” in a city, Hartford, Connecticut, where each Catholic church serves a distinctly separate ethnic group. Undoubtedly different readers will find specific threads of particular interest. Mine is in the family, with emphasis on the daughter/author capable of transmitting so much information, including the foibles of her mother, who is given to assigning blame and on the verge of a nervous breakdown until she starts working and . . .

Although Dr. Jack Allison retired from clinical medical practice in 2007 after a 30-year career in academic emergency medicine, he responded to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, where he treated hundreds of quake victims, and hundreds more who were without medical care.  Prior to retirement, he served as Chief of Staff of the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, North Carolina  Before that, Dr. Allison was Chief of Staff at the VAMC in Syracuse, New York, a position he had held since 1999. Jack presently serves as Professor of Emergency Medical Care, College of Health & Human Sciences, Western Carolina University, where he teaches, performs research, and spearheads faculty development. In 2012 he volunteered during the month of February with Medical Teams International in Kenya and Somalia where he provided both emergency medical care and public health education to Somali refugees; and in October he volunteered with . . .

This is the title poem of a new collection of poems — Thai Comic Books: Poems from my life in Thailand with the Peace Corps: 1967-1969 by Burgess Needle, published by Big Table Publishing. His first collection, Every Crow in the Blue Sky, was published by Diminuendo Press in 2009. He is currently editing a journal he kept while teaching in Thailand. Thai Comic Books by Burgess Needle (Thailand 1967–69) It wasn’t a school day, but these children looked as if they’d never been in school regardless of the time They were far more intimate with the water buffalo under the bridge than with texts or blackboards While all around spring rice planting went on forever and ever as it had all their brief lives and the only excitement occurred when the foreigner arrived, sat on a bench right on their own bridge and opened pages and pages of pictures . . .

Paul Frederick Kluge, commonly known as P. F. Kluge, is a novelist living in Gambier, Ohio. Kluge was raised in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier in 1964, then went to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D., and at the age of twenty-five he joined the Peace Corps. He wanted to be a writer and he wanted to be sent to Ethiopia or Turkey, where he thought he might soak up the culture that would make him a novelist, but as he relates in this video, the Peace Corps, in only Peace Corps logic, he was sent to Micronesia where the islands became his paradise in more ways than one.  On the islands, he would write the novel The Day That I Die, published in 1976. He would next write the classic Eddie And The Cruisers in ’80; Season for War in ’84; MacArthur’s Ghost, ’85; The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia in ’91, . . .

To order books whose titles are in blue from Amazon, click on the title or book cover — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that will help support our annual writers’ awards. The Market Bowl (Ages 5–8, set in Cameroon) by Jim Averbeck (Cameroon 1990–94) Charlesbridge $16.95 (hardcover) 32 pages 2013 • Hard as Kerosene (Peace Corps novel) by Aaron Barlow (Togo 1988–90) Peace Corps Writers Book $9.95 (paperback), $1.99 (Kindle) 268 pages January 2013 • Strange Borderlands (Poems) by Ben Berman (Zimbabwe 1998-2000) Able Muse Press $18.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) 104 pages January 2013 • The Gringo: A Memoir by J. Grigsby Crawford (Ecuador 2009–11) Wild Elephant Press $15.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) 225 pages 2013 • Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) Indie House Press $14.95 (paperback), $7.49 (Kindle) 258 pages 2013 • • Lure of . . .

Guatemala One:  A Journal of the First Peace Corps Project by George Gurney (1962–63) Self-Published $10.95 (paperback) 255 pages 2011 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–95) “In November of 1962, training began for the first Peace Corps project to work in the Central American country of Guatemala. In the spring of 1963, the first group of volunteers arrived in time for a military coup.” George “Lee” Gurney joined a group of Volunteers who trained in New York City, Puerto Rico, and at New Mexico State College before embarking upon a journey that widened his horizons forever. In his early twenties, he also found his wife in the Peace Corps. They both worked to help the people of rural Guatemala, but both suffered recurring health problems that truncated their tours. Many years after his Peace Corps experience, Gurney decided to write his memoir, which is actually a diary more than . . .

Bending with the Wind: Memoir of a Cambodian Couple’s Escape to America by Bounchoeurn Sao and Diyana D. Sao (as told to Karline F. Bird (Thailand 1968-70) McFarland & Company, Inc. $35.00 210 pages 2012 Reviewed by Collin Tong (Thailand 1968-69) With the fall of Phnom Penh on April 20, 1975 and the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge came the closing of Cambodia’s border and a cataclysmic reorganization of Cambodian society. As documented in previous histories and first-person accounts, the Cambodian nightmare led to the wave of terror marked by torture and the extermination of intelligentsia. More than two million people, a quarter of the population, perished in the Killing Fields. In 1970, the United States and South Vietnamese forces invaded eastern Cambodia, driving the North Vietnamese army further west. A young Cambodian double agent working for American and Cambodian Special Forces, Bounchoeurn Sao, was stationed near the Cambodian and Lao border. . . .

[Josh Swiller (Zambia 1994-96)  is the author of The Unheard, A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, a New York Times bestseller, and is a dedicated advocate for the deaf and disabled and for cultivating a peaceful and playful mind. He’s had a wide variety of careers including raw food chef, Peace Corps volunteer, forest ranger, and sheepskin slipper craftsman. Currently, he is a hospice worker and Zen monk in Ithaca, New York. Josh lectures throughout the country, sharing a message of acceptance, gratitude and love. www.joshswiller.com]     Switched at Birth’ on ABC Family casts a mix of deaf, hearing and hard-of-hearing actors, will also soon present an episode that is entirely in American Sign Language. This article from the LA TIMES came out today. It cites the work that Josh did in the production of the new show. The article was written by Deborah Vankin, Los Angeles Times February 27, 2013, 6:00 a.m. On . . .