Archive - 2013

Fairfield University MFA alumnus wins Peace Corps award for poetry Matthew Hamilton, a 2013 alumnus of the Fairfield University MFA in Creative Writing Program, has won the Peace Corps Writers 2013 Best Book of Poetry award for his first book, “The Land of the Four Rivers” (Cervena Barva Press, 2012). Hamilton, who has been both a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill and a Benedictine monk, volunteered with the Peace Corps in Armenia (2006-08) and the Philippines (2008-10). His book contains 30 poems dealing with what he saw and experienced in Armenia. Readers have praised his poems’ evocative clarity and accessibility. “Expedition into Mystery” opens: I walk over to a woman selling apricots and buy half a kilo. Her gold teeth thank me. Then I walk to Gorki Park, pluck one of my treats out of the bag and take a bite. Some of the juice falls on the sidewalk. A . . .

Talking with Mark Wentling John Coyne interviews Mark Wentling about his new novel Africa’s Embrace that has just been published by Peace Corps Writers. Africa’s Embrace is Mark Wentling’s (Honduras 1967-69, Togo 1970-73; staff: Togo, Gabon, Niger 1973-77) fictional account of the adventures of a young man named David from Kansas who travels to Africa to follow his destiny, and becomes caught up in a mystical, larger-than-life adventure. . Mark, first congratulations on your novel. How in the world did a PCV in Latin America end up in Africa? I always wanted to go to Africa and was hoping to go there when I first signed up for the Peace Corps. After leaving Honduras in May 1969, I traveled about Europe with two other Honduras PCVs. I returned to Wichita in September 1969 and finished my bachelor’s degree. In May 1970, I re-joined the Peace Corps and did training in . . .

Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) was on the TODAY show this morning and talked about her article on Mia Farrow in the new Vanity Fair. Maureen said she asked Farrow if her son, Ronan Farrow, was not Woody Allen’s son, but Frank Sinatra’s child. Farrow replied, “possibly.” “I asked her point blank,” said Orth. “I said, ‘Is Ronan Frank Sinatra’s son?’ and she said, ‘Possibly,’”  (Farrow and Sinatra were married from 1966-68.) “No DNA tests have been done. But they never really broke up. Obviously they got divorced. She was only 21 when she married him, he was 50, she lost her virginity to him … she said he was the love of her life.” Also, noted Orth, Ronan “looks a lot like Frank Sinatra and he sings like Frank Sinatra.” Added Orth, “He’s very close to the Sinatra family … Ronan told me that Nancy Sinatra senior fusses over him . . .

The October 7, 2013 issue of The New Yorker carries a Letter From Egypt column entitled, “Keeping The Faith” written by Peter Heller (China 1996-98) that focuses on Sheikh Mohammed Fakeeh, a blind preacher from a poor farming family on the banks of the Nile who for the first time gave a sermon at Aziz Bellah, and influential mosque in eastern Cairo. In recent days, a few Cairo imams had been suspended, and all of them had been warned not to preach directly about politics. Certain words and phrases were regarded as off limits: “coup,” “legitimacy,” “injustice,” “military rule.” But avoiding the subject entirely was also a risk. If a sermon seemed too bland or apolitical, members of the congregation might shout down the preacher. • Also in the same issue is a new short story by Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) entitled, “I’m The Meat, You’re The Knife” which is . . .

Calling New Delhi For Free (Essay) By Susan Kramer O’Neill (Venezuela 1973-74) Peace Corps Books, $10 (paperback); $3.99 ebook 131 pages 2013 Reviewed by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) I pulled Calling New Delhi for Free out of the mailer excited to be reviewing a collection of essays.  Nothing like a good essay to satisfy and inspire a writer.  I especially love painfully brilliant essays that make me want to say to the writer:  I know, I know; I’ve been there; I’m with you. (Example:  Love, Loss and What I Wore, by Ilene Beckerman.) I turned the book over.  The quotes on the back are hilarious.  Here’s the first one: Almost NOBODY buys essays, UNLESS you’re FAMOUS.” NAT SOBEL, of Sobel Weber Associates, Inc., my (former) agent. And so, I also love humorous essays as long as they’re screamingly funny.  Everything the late Nora Ephron wrote immediately comes to mind, . . .

I received an email from Marcia Krasnow informing me that Larry Fuchs (CD Philippines 1961-66) died in March at the age of 86. Marcia is the daughter of the late Dr. Joseph F. Kauffman who was the first Chief of the Peace Corps Division of Training at the Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. (1961-63). The two families were close. Both Fuchs and her father were at Brandeis University before joining the agency. Fuchs wrote one of the first books on the Peace Corps, Those Peculiar Americans: The Peace Corps and American National Character, published by Meredith Press in 1967. In the Peace Corps’ first year of operations, three hundred Volunteers were in the Philippines; after eighteen months, there were six hundred. Fuchs was, at the time, in charge of one third of all the Volunteers in the world. In his book about “those peculiar Americans,” he would write about . . .

by Dan Zigmond With Vietnam a major trading partner and Russian virtually the second language of Silicon Valley, the intersecting wars of the late 20th century are gradually fading from our collective consciousness. But literature moves at a pace slower than politics. If newspapers are the first draft of history, novels have the luxury of being the second, third or 10th. Great books of the Vietnam War are still appearing, nearly four decades after Tim O’Brien got his start. Now, just as Graham Greene and John le Carre penned the essential novels of the Cold War, so has writer and journalist Bob Shacochis given us a new masterpiece, every bit their equal, that will surely stand as the definitive political thriller of those fragile years of relative peace before Sept. 11, 2001. Shacochis begins “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” in the largely forgotten U.S. intervention in Haiti in the Clinton years, . . .