Archive - 2015

The May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine has an article entitled “Winners on Winning”  where they interview writers who won (and lost) literary contests in 2014. Among the handful of winning writers is our Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1990-93) for his 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Award ($2,500) and publication of his most recent collection, Truth Poker. Mark, a professor of English at West Virginia University, (and directs their creative writing program,) has won more contest than most writers. Here’s a short list: 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award for The River of Lost Voices: Stories From Guatemala 2001 Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Fiction Award for Steal My Heart 2004 George Garrett Fiction Award for An American Affair 2004 ABZ Poetry Prize for The Other Language 2012 Gival Press Novel Award for Julia & Rodrigo 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize for his story collection, The Incurable 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award . . .

Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse by Stanley Meisler (PC Staff 1964-67) Palgrave MacMillan 202 pages 2015 $26.00 Reviewed by Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64) • Full disclosure: Stan Meisler is one of the Peace Corps figures I have liked and admired most.  As a clueless upstart in the old Peace Corps Program Evaluation Division starting in 1964, I was lucky enough to have had Stan as a co-evaluator on three excursions out to where the real Peace Corps was stumbling along.  (A significant subset of people at Washington headquarters thought of the far-flung Volunteers as unglamorous supernumeraries, a kind of mud-stained boys’ and girls’ auxiliary, and the truest soul of the Peace Corps was to be found after work at Chez Francois next door on Connecticut Avenue). Stan and I went once to India together and twice to Ethiopia — both plenty real — to try to figure out how . . .

The Rumor Project by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) . I Time was, rumors and gossip were neighborhood affairs, exchanged over back-yard fences, in cafes and taverns, doctors’ waiting rooms, barber shops and chance meetings on the street. Neighbors informed or misinformed neighbors, hearsay was the general rule, (“I heard from a friend who has friend who said . . . ”), lies were sworn by, people may have been slandered and there was occasional hate speech. But it was a trickle of talk in cities and towns across the U.S. — with a relatively limited number of actors and limited reach — before the Internet provided a conduit for a tsunami of rumors, gossip, lies, misinformation (“It must be true because I saw it on the Internet.”), and hate speech that echoes around the world. Nevertheless, during World War II this trickle of talk in thousands of places was sufficiently worrisome for . . .

Mark Wentling’s ((PCV Honduras 1967-69, 1970-73; PC Staff Togo, Gabon & Niger 1973-77)  Africa’s Heart was selected by the Indie Editors of Kirkus Reviews to be featured in their April, 2015 issue. His review is one of the 20 reviews in the Indie section of the 4/15 Kirkus Reviews magazine. The publication is sent to over 5,000 industry professionals (librarians, publishers, agents, etc.) Less than 10% of Indie reviews are chosen to be included in this publication. Below is the Kirkus Review of Africa’s Heart. Congratulations, Mark. Africa’s Heart The Journey Ends in Kansas Wentling, Mark Peace Corps Writers (532 pp.) $20.00 paper | $8.99 e-book Jan. 15, 2015 978-1-935925-55-2 An ambitious novel concludes Wentling’s (Africa’s Release, 2014) African trilogy. Letivi, chief of the Ataku village, is faced with a modern dilemma: wealth disparity is growing in the village between those families who have sent children to work in Europe (who . . .

This is the first of a series of four essays on writers from the Peace Corps that will appear in World View magazine. WorldView ∙ Spring 2015 ∙ National Peace Corps Association BOOK LOCKER WRITERS FROM THE PEACE CORPS An unheralded literary movement By John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) One of the most important books of the late 1950s was The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, building bridges. He was called the “ugly American” only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lived and worked with the local people and, by the end of the novel, was beloved and admired by them. The bitter message of the novel, however, was that American diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective; and the implication was that the . . .

  In June Philip Brady (Zaire 1980–82) will publish his verse memoir, To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet, with Broadstone Books. The publishing sheet describes the book thus: Poised between myth and time, this unique verse memoir blends Homer’s discovery of the alphabet with a man’s recovery from near death and a boy’s struggle to see the adult world through the prism of an ancient epic. Brady is the author of three collections of poetry — Fathom, (Word Press, 2007); Weal (winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press); and Forged Correspondences, (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. His essay collection is By Heart: Reflections of a Rust-Belt Bard (University of Tennessee Press, 2008). A memoir, To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations & The Afterlife, was published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2003. He co‑edited, . . .