Author - John Coyne

[This essay (# 1) is from Andrew Clark’s (Senegal 1978-80) unfinished memoir Lost and Found in West Africa. His niece, Michiko Clark, was kind enough to send me the manuscript that the family found after Andrew’s death earlier this year.  This is one of three short sections that I culled from the book.  These pieces show how well Andrew understood Senegal, and it gives us all a feeling of how much he loved his host country. In the old days we would have called  him a Super Vol.] Arrival Perhaps the greatest gift that Senegal and Africa gave me was the ability, on a mere moment’s notice, to plunge right back into that world, see once again the faces, recall snatches of conversations, hear voices and laughter and cries, and relive experiences as if they had only just happened minutes before. Even in the dead of a bitter Midwestern winter, I could close my eyes . . .

[This essay is from Andrew Clark’s (Senegal 1978-80) unfinished memoir Lost and Found in West Africa. His niece, Michiko Clark, was kind enough to sent me the manuscript that the family found after Andrew’s death earlier this year.  This is one of three short sections that I culled from the book.  These pieces show how well Andrew understood Senegal, and it gives us all a feeling of how much he loved his host country. In the old days we would have called  him a Super Vol.] Assimilation, Acclimation, and Accommodation In the early days, one of the main problems with the language was figuring out the different tenses without a common language. After some perplexing experiences, I realized that Mamadou didn’t clearly understand tenses in French because he had never learned them. I was, therefore, on my own when it came to deciphering past, present, and future in Pulaar. As long as I had those . . .

Michiko Clark wrote me recently. She works for Pantheon, the book publisher, and she helped to promote a Peace Corps book awhile back, but she was writing now about her family, especially about her uncle Andrew Clark, who recently passed away. In her email, she wrote:   “I come from a family of Peace Corps Volunteers. My father was in Nigeria and Uganda, 1966-68. Then his two brothers, Andrew (Senegal, 1978-80) and Peter (Paraguay, 1988-90) joined. The next wave includes a cousin in Mauritania (2000-02) and my sister in the Dominican Republic (2003-2005). “But it was my uncle Andrew who never really ended his Peace Corps experience. After his service in Senegal, he went on to get his doctorate in African History and became a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, spreading his knowledge and stories of Senegal and West Africa with his students, and encouraging many of them to join the Peace . . .

My recent blog on novels that featured ‘Peace Corps fictional characters’ has generated some interest in novels written by RPCVs with Peace Corps characters. And that, naturally, leads us to Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65). Theroux’s first three novels were set in Africa: Fong and the Indians (1968); Girls at Play (1969); Jungle Lovers (1971). Years later the books were combined into a single edition from Penguin (1996) and published as On The Edge of the Great Rift: Three Novels of Africa. In the Preface to this volume, Theroux writes: “At the age of twenty-two, hoping to avoid being drafted into the US army, but also wishing to see the world, I joined the Peace Corps. When I went to Malawi in 1963 it was called the Nyasaland Protectorate.” After the Peace Corps and his ‘dismissal,” which he has written about elsewhere, he went to Uganda and signed a four-year contract to teach at Makerere . . .

Huntsville poet describes Peace Corps influences during Washington, D.C., conference Thursday, April 21, 2011 By Ann Marie Martin The Huntsville Times The Peace Corps promises to give you “the toughest job you’ll ever love” helping people around the world. When you’re a poet, the Peace Corps also gives you experiences that can inspire your art for a lifetime. Acclaimed local poet Virginia Gilbert discussed how her time in the Peace Corps has fueled her writing during “Broadening the Poet’s Vision Through the Peace Corps Experience,” a panel presentation she led during the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ 2011 Conference & Bookfair in Washington, D.C., in February. Gilbert, professor emeritus of English at Alabama A&M University, is the author of the poetry collection “That Other Brightness.” Her poems also have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Now, The North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, New . . .

The other day I received in the mail a beautiful coffee table size book, Vietnam Journeys, from the publish, Gail Fields. The photos for this lovely book were done (I believe) by her husband, Charles Fields, a first class photographer who is a member of the Photography Arts Collective, the Provincetown Art Association, and the American Society of Media Photographers. He is one serious photographer. However, we review and promote only PCV and RPCV and Peace Corps Staff writers and their books. What gives? Why am I getting this lovely book? Then I noticed that the text was done by Mary Ann Braggs, who lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and who is a journalist. She was in the Peace Corps from 1980-82, serving in Lobatse, Botswana and that qualifies Vietnam Journeys for a listing in our new books for April and an upcoming review on this site.

Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond by Roland Merullo ( Micronesia 1979–80) AJAR Contemporaries 213 pages 2011 $16.00 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) REVERE BEACH ELEGY is an autobiography of a painfully honest, and consequently endearing writer, Roland Merullo. It is not, however, “all about him.” Merullo reflects upon his myriad experiences in ways that hold a mirror to the reader’s own life stories and his or her own reactions to them. You don’t have to be Italian American (though I am) from an lower middle class enclave in Revere Beach, Massachusetts to empathize with Merullo’s childhood in an immigrant society with all the pressures that implies — “strictures of the old world and the promises and possibilities of the new.” When he is almost blinded by a baseball, his family believes that it was their prayers to St. Lucy that cured him, as they . . .

From the Journal News written by Karen Croke April 17, 2011 Meet Pelham author John Coyne Last Sunday, John Coyne had more than a passing interest in the Masters golf tournament. Yes, Charl Schwartzel won in a thrilling match, but for Coyne, the sense of history and mythology that surrounds the tournament, and the course where it’s played, Augusta National, hold a particular fascination. It’s the subject of Coyne’s latest book, The  Caddie Who Won the Masters. (Peace Corps Writers, 2011). Coyne says famed golfer Bobby Jones, who created Augusta and the Masters, had always hoped an amateur might one day win the championship. So, in Coyne’s novel, Tim Alexander, a Pelham golf pro, makes just such a run for the title and is helped on his quest by some supernatural forces – namely, a squad of departed golf stars, including Westchester native Gene Sarazen- who emerge, very “Field of . . .

RPCV Poet Paul Violi (Nigeria 1966-67) died of cancer on April 2, 2011, writes William Grimes in an obituary published on April 15 in The New York Times. Grimes says: “Violi was a poet with an easy, conversational style and satiric bent who reworked arcane historical verse forms and invented his own in poems that mimicked glossaries, errata slips, travel brochures and cover letters.” In a Peace Corps Writers.org review written by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65) of Violi’s collection, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002, Mueller wrote, “If you need to laugh at the absurdity of life during these dark days, I recommend that you run out and purchase this edgy, hilarious book by Paul Violi. But be forewarned: don’t expect frivolous humor. The unnamed narrator of each story has the sensibility of a twisted, paranoid imp. His is the deadpan voice of a jaundiced observer whose life is . . .