Peace Corps writers

Lure of Service: My Peace Corps Adventures at Middle Age By Diane Shugrue Gallagher (Cape Verde 1990-92) Self-published, Gallagher Associates, $16.95 257 pages 2012 Reviewed by Barbara E. Joe (Honduras 2000-03) The cover of this book stands out because of a lovely color photo of a smiling blond woman, her pale arms outstretched over a group of bare-chested dark-skinned children gathered under a giant baobab tree. It graphically represents both a contrast and conversion of cultures. Like me, author Diane Gallagher was inspired by President Kennedy’s Peace Corps’ message in 1961, but wasn’t able to go just then. In 1990, four children and a divorce later, she finally took a leap of faith, joining the Peace Corps at age 53 and enduring the skepticism of family and friends who suggested that a weekend in Vermont might do as well.  She was sent to Cape Verde, a small Portuguese and Creole-speaking . . .

    At Home in the World: Globalization and the Peace Corps in Nepal by James F. Fisher (Nepal 1962-64) 2013 218 pp., 21 b & w illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index, 22 x 14 cm., $25.00 ( paperback.), $40.000 (hard cover)   Reviewed by Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) • Looking back at the Peace Corps of a half century ago seems to have caught on recently, detailing and analyzing some of the earliest PCV experiences worldwide, if the number of recent books on the subject is any indication. Jim Fisher’s book, ‘At Home in the World: Globalization and the Peace Corps in Nepal,’ joins such other accounts as Geraldine Kennedy’s ‘The Liberia One Storybook: The First Peace Corps Volunteers to Liberia Tell Their Stories‘; George Gurney’s ‘Guatemala One: A Journal of the First Peace Corps Project‘; Julian Weldon Martin’s ‘Imagonna: Peace Corps Memories‘ (from Nigeria in the early 1960s), and others. . . .

In the first years of the Peace Corps, Charlie Peters, the legendary Chief of the Division of Evaluation at the Peace Corps, would hire journalists to do evaluations of Peace Corps projects. Novelist Fletcher Knebel did an evaluation of Liberia and from that would come his best-selling novel, The Zinzin Road. Mark Harris, the author of Bang the Drum Slowly, wrote a book about his “Peace Corps experience” in the dark days surrounding JFK’s assassination. However, this story from Dr. Jack Allison (Malawi 1966–69), who is a  Professor of Emergency Medical Care at College of Health & Human Sciences of Western Carolina University, is new to me, and I am happy that Jack sent it along to be published. It is another tale from those wonderful early days of the Mad Men at the Peace Corps agency. Here is Jack’s narrative of the famous New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin in Malawi in 1966, and what went wrong and right for . . .

Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) Indie House Press 237 pages $14.95 (paperback), $7.49 (Kindle) 2013 Review by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) Julie R. Dargis was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco more than twenty-five years ago. After her service, she “. . . continued kicking around the world in search of adventure.” She got more than she bargained for in war-torn countries like Serbia, Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, Darfur, Rwanda, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire. Eventually Julie finds the real goal of her search . . . herself. Not only has she written a fascinating memoir of her exploits, but she writes poetry as well, and has published a collection, Seven Sonnets. Here’s an excerpt from an ode to Peace Corps. I lay in bed, then sat up with a start. The Peace Corps was for me a time to seek; To live and . . .

Volunteers of America: The Journey of a Peace Corps Teacher by Dennis L. Carlson (Libya 1968-69) Sense Publishers, $38.00 paperback. $98.00 hardcover April 2012 Reviewed by Martin R. Ganzglass (Somalia 1966-68) Relying on a forty five year old journal he kept on almost a daily basis, Dennis Carlson has written a timely and thoughtful view of his service as a Peace Corps teacher in Libya. The book mainly chronicles his life in the small village of Igsaya, and his teaching experiences in that village and an even smaller school five kilometers away. Carlson describes the impact of Colonel Qaadafi’s 1969 coup on Igsaya and Tripoli: the food shortages and suffering of villagers due to the closing of market places and a ban on inter-village bus travel; the initial calm in the capital, followed by the threatening presence of armed soldiers, the beginning of anti-American rhetoric and subsequent street demonstrations, the . . .

Strange Borderlands (Poems) By Ben Berman (Zimbabwe 1998-2000) Able Muse Press, $18.95 80 Pages 2013 Reviewed by Jan Worth-Nelson (Tonga 1976-78) As an unwilling alumna of a Peace Corps tragedy during my service many years ago – the 1976 murder in the Kingdom of Tonga of one volunteer by another, I quickly attuned to heart-pulsing themes of violence and cultural dislocation in Ben Berman’s riveting first poetry collection, Strange Borderlands. I have never quite recovered from the shock and senselessness of that murder, not to mention the unceasing parade of vivid, direct, in-your-face carnage – chickens, cats, dogs, horses, whales, the old woman in the hut behind me – what seems, in persistent memory, to be a daily, bloody assault, often in startling contrast to banal quotidian life. During a powerful earthquake during my first year, I stumbled out of my hut shrieking with fear – I would die 9,000 . . .

[Maureen Orth (Colombia 1965-67) has been a special correspondent for Vanity Fair since 1993. She is the founder of the Marina Orth Foundation and Escuela Marina Orth in Medellín, Colombia, which she was a PCV.  The MarinaOrthFoundation.org now has 3 schools with 1200 students, all One Laptop Per Child schools in Colombia. Orth began her journalism career in 1973 as the third female writer ever hired by Newsweek and won a National Magazine Award for group coverage of the arts at Newsweek. She is the author of Vulgar Favors (Delacorte Press, 1999), a book about the murder of Gianni Versace, and The Importance of Being Famous (Henry Holt, 2002), a collection of her Vanity Fair articles. PCV Orth in Colombia This piece appeared on the vf.com website on March 15, 2013, and is reprinted with Maureen’s permission. ] Former Irish President Mary Robinson on Gay Rights, Sheryl Sandberg-and Pope Francis’s Future By Maureen Orth 2:17 . . .

Book Party in D.C. The Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa Happy Hour and Book Party in Washington, DC is set for  Friday, March 22, 2013 at  The Dirty Martini, 1223 Connecticut Ave. NW (mezzanine level) www.dirtymartinidc.com. The time: 5-7 pm If you haven’t done so yet…please check out the trailer for the book… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SoqmUIHuRw Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) Indie House Press $14.95 (paperback), $7.49 (Kindle) 258 pages 2013

Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) editor of Gallery Cat published this funny and true piece this afternoon, a commencement address by Neil Gaimen. Read the introduction by Jason and then watch the short video, do so if you are interested in writing, the arts, or just doing good for the world. In May, HarperCollins will publish Make Good Art, a Chip Kidd-designed book version of a Neil Gaiman commencement address. Gaiman’s speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia went viral last year, sharing “secret freelancer knowledge” that all kinds of writers, editors and freelance workers can use. We’ve embedded a video of his speech above-it also contains the best advice he ever received, delivered by the great novelist Stephen King. Here is Gaiman’s secret freelancer knowledge: You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of today’s world is . . .

Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965-67) is out with the fifth book in his cycle of novels set in the high plains of Colorado. Knopf has just published Benediction, and it is reviewed in the Sunday March 10, 2013, Book Section of The New York Times. Kent’s earlier, best-selling novels about this close-knit community–Holt, Colorado–are The Tie That Binds, Where You Once Belonged, Plainsong and Eventide. The plot is summed up this way: When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them. Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the . . .

This is from “Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie” an online journal about memoir. Melissa Shook is the editor. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) Interview by Melissa Shook I’ve read Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s ambitious and skillfully crafted memoir, Girls of Tender Age, three times. Forty-seven chapters of varying lengths, 275 pages, crammed with divergent, interweaving stories located  in a neighborhood where “you eat guinea food, drink harp beer, ostracize the frogs (since, as the most recent immigrants, they are at the bottom of the pecking order)” in a city, Hartford, Connecticut, where each Catholic church serves a distinctly separate ethnic group. Undoubtedly different readers will find specific threads of particular interest. Mine is in the family, with emphasis on the daughter/author capable of transmitting so much information, including the foibles of her mother, who is given to assigning blame and on the verge of a nervous breakdown until she starts working and . . .

Although Dr. Jack Allison retired from clinical medical practice in 2007 after a 30-year career in academic emergency medicine, he responded to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, where he treated hundreds of quake victims, and hundreds more who were without medical care.  Prior to retirement, he served as Chief of Staff of the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, North Carolina  Before that, Dr. Allison was Chief of Staff at the VAMC in Syracuse, New York, a position he had held since 1999. Jack presently serves as Professor of Emergency Medical Care, College of Health & Human Sciences, Western Carolina University, where he teaches, performs research, and spearheads faculty development. In 2012 he volunteered during the month of February with Medical Teams International in Kenya and Somalia where he provided both emergency medical care and public health education to Somali refugees; and in October he volunteered with . . .

This is the title poem of a new collection of poems — Thai Comic Books: Poems from my life in Thailand with the Peace Corps: 1967-1969 by Burgess Needle, published by Big Table Publishing. His first collection, Every Crow in the Blue Sky, was published by Diminuendo Press in 2009. He is currently editing a journal he kept while teaching in Thailand. Thai Comic Books by Burgess Needle (Thailand 1967–69) It wasn’t a school day, but these children looked as if they’d never been in school regardless of the time They were far more intimate with the water buffalo under the bridge than with texts or blackboards While all around spring rice planting went on forever and ever as it had all their brief lives and the only excitement occurred when the foreigner arrived, sat on a bench right on their own bridge and opened pages and pages of pictures . . .

Paul Frederick Kluge, commonly known as P. F. Kluge, is a novelist living in Gambier, Ohio. Kluge was raised in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier in 1964, then went to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D., and at the age of twenty-five he joined the Peace Corps. He wanted to be a writer and he wanted to be sent to Ethiopia or Turkey, where he thought he might soak up the culture that would make him a novelist, but as he relates in this video, the Peace Corps, in only Peace Corps logic, he was sent to Micronesia where the islands became his paradise in more ways than one.  On the islands, he would write the novel The Day That I Die, published in 1976. He would next write the classic Eddie And The Cruisers in ’80; Season for War in ’84; MacArthur’s Ghost, ’85; The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia in ’91, . . .

To order books whose titles are in blue from Amazon, click on the title or book cover — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that will help support our annual writers’ awards. The Market Bowl (Ages 5–8, set in Cameroon) by Jim Averbeck (Cameroon 1990–94) Charlesbridge $16.95 (hardcover) 32 pages 2013 • Hard as Kerosene (Peace Corps novel) by Aaron Barlow (Togo 1988–90) Peace Corps Writers Book $9.95 (paperback), $1.99 (Kindle) 268 pages January 2013 • Strange Borderlands (Poems) by Ben Berman (Zimbabwe 1998-2000) Able Muse Press $18.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) 104 pages January 2013 • The Gringo: A Memoir by J. Grigsby Crawford (Ecuador 2009–11) Wild Elephant Press $15.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) 225 pages 2013 • Pit Stop in the Paris of Africa by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984–87) Indie House Press $14.95 (paperback), $7.49 (Kindle) 258 pages 2013 • • Lure of . . .