Author - Marian Haley Beil

The Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Children’s Book was first presented in 2001. Each award is given the  year following its the publishing. This year we have something special — for the first time since Peace Corps Writers has been presenting book awards in 1990 we have a repeat winner. Just last year Jim Averbeck won the same award for his book The Market Bowl that was published in 2013. • The 2015 Award for Best Children’s Book goes to — A Hitch at the Fairmont by Jim Averbeck (Cameroon 1990–94) . In 1956 at the fabulous San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, 11-year-old Jack teams up with the famous movie director Alfred Hitchcock to uncover a plot involving drugged chocolates, mistaken identities, kidnapping, disguises, and close escapes. References to actual Hitchcock films and anecdotes abound throughout, in chapter headings, settings, and focused descriptions reminiscent of camera pan-ins. Congratulations again, Jim! . . .

The winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book is THE CONSOLATIONS by John W. Evans (Bangladesh 1999–2001) John Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant, their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When John finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear. In the quieter, daily emotions that continue after the formal occasions for mourning are over, and in the six years that follow Katie’s death, the poems of The Consolations articulate the dislocations and disruptions of grief in a continuing life. It looks to both past and future to make . . .

First given in 1990, the Maria Thomas Fiction Award is named for the novelist Maria Thomas [Roberta Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73)] who lost her life in August, 1989, while working in Ethiopia for a relief agency. • The winner of the 2015 Maria Thomas Fiction Award is Kilometer 99 — A Novel by Tyler McMahon (El Salvador 1999–2002) Quoting our review by Phil Damon (Ethiopia 1963–65): This is a gem of a book. It’s a coming of age saga that touches on visceral themes affecting numerous cultures in a disarmingly naïve narrative voice. Under the guise of a surfer’s escape fantasy gone haywire, author Tyler McMahon deftly enables his part-Hawaiian Peace Corps Volunteer engineer Malia to narrate her story in such a way that it unfolds on numerous levels of situation and meaning. At one level, it’s a fictional chronicle of the El Salvador earthquakes of 2001, limning the experiences of . . .

THE PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE AWARD was initiated in 1992. It is presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best depiction of life in the Peace Corps — be it daily life, project assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. Initially entries could be short works including: personal essay, story, novella, poem, letter, cartoon, or song. Beginning in 2009 memoirs were added to the list. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965–67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. • The winner of the 2015 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award is At Home on the Kazakh Steppe: A Peace Corps Memoir by Janet Givens (Kazakhstan 2004–06) • In her memoir, Janet clearly expresses the First Goal of the Peace Corps, writing that as a . . .

A Writer Writes It’s Our Planet and We Can Do With It What We Want by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. Frequently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected. — Pope Francis’ Encyclical, “Laudato Si — On the Care Of Our Common Home” Hey, it’s our planet and we can do with it what we want. After all, Genesis grants mankind “dominion” over the earth. That’s dominion, as in control, supreme authority, dominance. So what is there about . . .

A Writer Writes Imagined Lives: A Hollywood Fable by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • I was a star. Nope, bigger than that. A STAR. Bigger. A SUPER STAR. You got it. I was BIG. I wasn’t just an a-lister. I was an A-LISTER. If I was at a party, it became an A-LIST PARTY. I was on every red carpet. Fans would scream my name when I emerged from my limo with two, maybe three, gorgeous women — every man’s fantasy — at my side. Every man’s fantasy, my reality. Women threw themselves at me — beautiful, sexy, surgically enhanced, if necessary, beyond perfection, women. I could have any woman I wanted. Every man’s fantasy, my everyday reality. Women wanted nothing more than to be with me, to be seen with me, to warm my bed, to stroke my ego. We didn’t talk much. We had sex, tanned by the . . .

Peace Corps Worldwide will be there in the guise of Peace Corps Writers. John and I are presenting two programs: “Peace Corps Memoirists Talk about Their Writing” Friday, June 5, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm Unit 1 Dormitory Quad – APR (All Purpose Room) The panelists will be: Suzanne Adam, author of Marrying Santiago (Colombia 1964–66) Kay Gillies Dixon, author of Wanderlust Satisfied (Colombia 1962–64) Catherine Onyemelukwe, author of My Life and Loves Abroad (Nigeria 1962–64) Angene Wilson, author of Africa on My Mind: Educating Americans for Fifty Years (1962–64) Writing Your Peace Corps Memoir and Preparing Your Manuscript for Publication Saturday, June 6 – 9 AM– 10 AM Unit 1 – Deutsch John will talk writing; Marian, making your book a reality. Pre-conference social gathering We hope that all Peace Corps writers attending the conference will join us at FreeHouse, in Berkeley Thursday evening, June 4th from 7:30pm – . . .

Nigeria Revisited: My Life and Loves Abroad Catherine Onyemelukwe (Nigeria 1962–64) Peace Corps Writers October 2014 314 pages $14.62 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Marianne Arieux (Ethiopia 1965–67) • It is 1969. Former Peace Corps Volunteer and American Midwesterner, now Nigerian wife and mother, Catharine Onyemeluke nests with her family in her in-laws remote Igbo village, fleeing the encroaching Biafran war. For the first time since coming to Africa, she must become part of a rural African village without electricity, running water, or a health facility nearby; an undertaking that is a hallmark of Peace Corps training. Onyemelukwe’s telling of this particular venture highlights her achievement in this well written memoir — a tale of a young woman whose adventurous spirit carries her into a life path introduced and limned by the Peace Corps and its lore. Her book has the tone of a life-cycle epic. We are invited on . . .

A Writer Writes — Breaking Bread with Lindsay Lohan and Obama by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • It was Lindsay Lohan’s attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw drew the line. Not at Ozzy Osbourne, Paula Jones, Larry Flint, Donald Trump or, Lord have mercy on us, Kim Kardashian. “The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan. She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break,” Brokaw said after the 2013 dinner. “There was more dignity at my daughter’s junior prom than there is [at] what I’m seeing on C-SPAN there.” That may be an unfair comparison. Junior proms set a rather high bar. But cut Lindsay some slack. She may have been better behaved than the room full of liquored-up hacks. Her host, Greta van Susteren, who spins right-wing fables for Fox News, said: “The table . . .

Bartram’s Garden by Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998–2000) Carnegie Mellon University Press February 2015 82 pages $15.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978–79) • As luck and timing would have it, I come to Eleanor Stanford’s Bartram’s Garden just as a seemingly infinite number of Brood XXIII cicadas have emerged from their hidey holes in western Kentucky. I can’t imagine a better book to read to the accompaniment of the music of the spheres, as I keep calling the rattling surround sound produced in the resonant abdomens of the male cicadas clinging to the leaves of every tree, bush, and flower in our neighborhood. The last time I heard it — exactly thirteen years ago, in accordance with the periodicity of Brood XXIII — my children, who are now both almost out of the teenage years, were the same age as Stanford’s young children. If the home is a . . .

Neighborhood Dogs by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965-67) • POODLES, I THINK, were bred to be work dogs, although I’m uncertain what work they did. They were not intended to be primped, pampered and coiffed to within an inch of their dog lives, trimmed of most hair except for little puffs at their paws, rumps, shoulders and tails, and minced around at dog-shows like some foppish dandy at the French royal court. That’s no way to treat a dog. Adding insult to injury, recently I saw a tricked-out poodle in the neighborhood whose owner (and surely it wasn’t the dog’s decision), dyed each of those puffs of hair orange shading into purple. I was tempted to round on him (the owner, not the dog), accuse him of animal cruelty (or at least deep humiliation), and call the animal control agency and have the dog taken away. I didn’t, of course. The . . .

Je suis Charlie. Je suis ne pas Charlie Hebdo. by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • Until the massacre of the writers and cartoonist at the French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, I had never seen the publication, nor was I familiar with its brand of outrageous satire. Adam Gopnik wrote in the Jan. 19 issue of The New Yorker: They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy . . .. Charlie Hebdo was — will be again, let us hope — a satirical journal of a kind these days found in France almost alone . . .. The coarser and more scabrous cartoons that marked the covers of Charlie Hebdo — and took in Jesus and Moses, along with Muhammad; angry rabbis and ranting bishops, along with imams — were the latest example of that tradition.” The magazine was . . .

John Sherman (Nigeria 1966–66, Malawi 1967–68) and Chi Sherman have just published a collaborative, spoken-word CD — Shades: Writings on Race Culture Gender. The CD has 25 tracks of poetry and prose, with original music by Gabriel Harley. There will be a release party for the CD at Indy Reads Books 911 Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis IN on Saturday, May 9. For more information and to order the CD, write John at john@mesaverdepress.com

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 . . .