Peace Corps writers

Bully Bean (Lima Bear Stories) by Thomas Weck (Ethiopia 1965-67) and Peter Weck Illustrated by Len DiSalvo Lima Bear Press 30 pages Hardcover $15.95 2013 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) By this point, I think it’s safe to say that my kids will grow up with Thomas and Peter Weck’s Lima Bears; the series first appeared two years ago, and we’ve been following them ever since. In the short span of childhood, that’s been half my kids’ lives! The Wecks’ have released the fifth title in their series, Bully Bean, and I’ve been finding that there’s an odd congruence between where my kids are developmentally and the subject matters the Wecks’ are tackling. The bean bears of Limalot were facing their unfounded fears in The Cave Monster right around the time my kids discovered that the dark spaces under the bed and in the closet were . . .

[Norm Rush (Botswana, Director 1978-83) was interviewed at length yesterday in the New York Times Magazine about his new book Subtle Bodies, about his life, and about (most importantly, in my mind) his long marriage to Elsa Rush. The couple has been married for 56 years. One of the few things that Sam Brown, who in 1977 was appointed head of Action under Jimmy Carter, did was to hire Elsa and Norm to be one of the first ‘couple’ directors of the agency. The story is that Brown met Elsa and Norm at a party, which is true, but the Rushes, like Sam Brown, had been heavily involved in anti-war politics for many years. Brown was looking for a successful ‘married couple’ to do the job. The Rushes were certainly that successful married couple. PCVs who served under Elsa and Norm have only the highest praise for them as people . . .

Well, I spent a majority of it reading Bob Shacochis’s (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76) big, sprawling, long, and complex novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, a novel that spans five decades and three continents. It is a book Shacochis has been writing for twenty years and it is out this month from Grove Atlantic. They are calling it, Bob’s magnum opus. The plot goes something like this: A humanitarian lawyer, Tom Harrington, travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful seductive photojournalist, he is confronted there with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It is the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. To make sense of the death of the journalist, Harrington must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both the photojournalist and a member of the Special Forces who was assigned . . .

Letters from the Sixties: College, Peace Corps, Marriage by Jon C. Halter (Venezuela 1966-68) Self-published (available on Amazon.com) $9.99 308 pages 2013 Review by Barbara E. Joe (Honduras 2000-03) Having lived through the staid Fifties as they morphed into the tumultuous Sixties, I fully expected a wild ride, given the title of this book. Instead, these selected letters reveal a rather wholesome young man, Jon Halter, apparently a straight arrow throughout, someone whose most significant deviation from ordinary middle-class American life -and it did turn out to be significant-was joining the Peace Corps and marrying the Venezuelan sweetheart he met while in service. He is revealed as a conscientious son and faithful husband who saved his prolific college correspondence with his parents and, later, with his new wife, who was waiting alone in Venezuela for her visa to join him in the U.S. After the birth of their son, also . . .

Bonefish Bob: A Tribute by Bernard F. Blanche (Brazil 1965-67) Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co. $13.97 (paperback) 160 pages 2011 Reviewed by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) This is a book for the passionate fisherman, one who longs to fish eternally. It is also a testament to the life of a man who took solace on water and relished the challenge, Bonefish Bob Berger. The author met Bonefish Bob in Islamorada, Florida in 2004, when his subject was 70 years old and only two years shy of suicide, a death that forces survivors to second guess whether they could have done more. In the author’s case, he decided to write about Bonefish Bob’s life. This is a delicate obituary, a tribute to a man whom the author admired. Robert Edward Berger was born in 1934. He grew up in York, Maine where he developed a keen love for fishing. . . .

To further fulfill its goals to encourage, recognize and promote Peace Corps writers, RPCV Writers & Readers, the newsletter that was the precursor of PeaceCorpsWriters.org and PeaceCorpsWorldwide.org, presented their first annual awards for outstanding writing in 1990. Awards have been given each year since then. When possible, they are presented at the RPCV Conference Awards Ceremony. The awards are: The Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award FIRST GIVEN IN 1990, the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award was named to honor Paul Cowan, a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Ecuador from 1966 to 1967. Cowan wrote The Making of An Un-American about his experiences as a Volunteer in Latin America in the ’60s. A longtime activist and political writer for The Village Voice, Cowan died of leukemia in 1988. The Maria Thomas Fiction Award THE MARIA THOMAS FICTION AWARD is named after the novelist Maria Thomas [Roberta Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73)] who was the . . .

Benediction, a new new novel by Kent Haruf, was published in March and I missed the pub date. Here is some information on the book. Benediction By Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965–67) Knopf $25.95 (hardcover), $15.00 (paperback), $12.99 (Kindle) 272 pages 2013 An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Kent Haruf writes about small towns and regular people, but don’t underestimate his ambition. He is writing about life, and to do that he has returned again and again–first with Plainsong, later with Eventide–to the small town of Holt, located on the eastern plains of Colorado. In Benediction, Haruf introduces us to Dad Lewis, a 77-year-old hardware store owner who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience of reading Haruf is a slow burn, but as we meet the people who gather around Dad Lewis in his final days we begin to see that this is a book . . .

John Coyne interviews Susan O’Neill about her new collection of essays Calling New Delhi for Free (and other ephemeral truths of the 21st century) that has just been published by Peace Corps Writers. • Susan, let’s begin with some basic stuff: what is your educational background? I earned an RN at a now-defunct three-year nursing school, Holy Cross School of Nursing, in South Bend, IN. I signed up for the Army while I was a student, so I could help my parents pay the bill with my monthly Army stipend, and afterward, the Army trained me in the Operating Room specialty. Then they sent me to Vietnam (the basis for my short story collection, Don’t Mean Nothing). After that I amassed a degree in Journalism, over 10 years, graduating at last in 1984 from at the U of Maine at Orono. o Where did you serve as a PCV? I . . .

New Madrid is the national journal of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University. It takes its name from the New Madrid seismic zone, which falls within the central Mississippi Valley and extends through western Kentucky. Between 1811 and 1812, four earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7.0 struck this region, changing the course of the Mississippi River, creating Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and ringing church bells as far away as Boston. The editor of the New Madrid Journal is Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79).  Ann is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of the book Easter Vigil, which earned the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and our RPCV Writers and Readers Award. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow as well as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She is also the winner of an Al Smith Fellowship from the . . .

Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1990-93) has won the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awards for Prose presented by the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Grassroots, SIUC’s undergraduate literary magazine. Mark won for his 2012 collection of stories, The Incurables (University of Notre Dame Press). Mark receives an honorarium of $1000, and will present a public reading and participate in panels at the Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The dates for the 2013 festival are October 16–18, 2013. Judges come from the faculty of SIUC’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and the award winners were selected by the staff of GRASSROOTS, SIUC’s undergraduate literary magazine. Mark directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He is the author of An American Affair, winner of the 2004 George Garrett Prize for fiction, as well as . . .

Jurors for the $50,000 St. Francis College Literary Prize have narrowed the more than 170 submissions down to a short list of five novels competing for the biannual award, one of the richest in the United States. The books and authors are: Carry the One (Simon & Schuster), by Carol Anshaw The Middlesteins (Grand Central Publishing), by Jami Attenberg Mule (Mariner Books), by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) The Right-Hand Shore (Picador), by Christopher Tilghman Dirt (Harper Perennial), by David Vann The winner will be announced at the opening gala for the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21. “It’s a prize that has no parallel really among existing literary prizes and comes at a perfect time in a writer’s career,” said Jonathan Dee, a member of the jury and winner of the second Literary Prize for his novel, The Privileges. “There’s a lot of attention when you make your debut. . . .

It is time to nominate your favorite Peace Corps book published in 2012 for the Peace Corps Writers annual awards. Make your nomination(s) in the comment section following this announcement so people can see what books have been recognized. You may nominate your own book; books written by friends; books written by total strangers. The books can be about the Peace Corps or on any topic. The books must have been published in 2012. The awards will be announced in August. Thank you for nominating your favorite book written by a PCV, RPCV or Peace Corps Staff. A framed certificate and money are given to the winners. Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award First given in 1990, the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award was named to honor Paul Cowan, a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Ecuador. Cowan wrote The Making of An Un-American about his experiences as a Volunteer in Latin America in the sixties. . . .

The Fallout by S.A. Bodeen (Tanzania 1989–90) Feiwel and Friends $16.99 (hard cover); $8.89 (Kindle) 336 pages September 2013 Reviewed by Deidre Swesnik (Mali 1996–98) SPOILER ALERT! The Fallout is the sequel to The Compound. If you haven’t read The Compound and intend to, you really shouldn’t read this review. It’s hard to talk about anything in The Fallout that wouldn’t spoil at least some of The Compound. Ok — I warned you. Seriously — I “oh-so-totally-frickin’” warned you. Ok – so I really wanted to say oh-so-totally-frickin’ because it’s cool and because I can legitimately put it into this review since it’s a direct quote from the book. Yep. This young adult book was a lot of fun to get into, and definitely a page-turner. This combination of suspense, survival, and teenage angst makes for a great read. I’m spoiling The Compound for you now. This is officially your . . .

Independent writer and publisher Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) will be reading in San Francisco  from her latest book Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa. She is being hosted by the Commonwealth Club and NorCal Peace Corps Association. Date: Monday, September 23 2013 Time: 5:30 p.m. — networking reception; 6 p.m. — program; 7 p.m. — book signing Location: Commenwealth Club/SF Office, 595 Market Street  (directions) Cost: Members free, $20 non-members, $7 students (with valid ID) • Julie will take you on a trip around the world through selected excerpts from stories and verse in her book. In addition, she will share reflections on her humanitarian aid work with African and Eastern European populations affected by war and natural disasters, and include how she dealt with adversity in her day-to-day life in some of the most difficult and dangerous countries in the world. She will close with a brief . . .