Peace Corps writers

Expatriates and exiles Peace Corps writers are, at least for a while, expatriates and exiles from their culture, and from that experience they gain a new perspective, even a new vocabulary, as Richard Wiley recalls from living in Korea. “As I started to learn Korean I began to see that language skewed actual reality around, and as I got better at it I began to understand that it was possible to see everything differently. Reality is a product of language and culture, that’s what I learned.”      The experience is also intensely educational. The late novelist Maria Thomas said of her time in Ethiopia, “it was a great period of discovery. There was the discovery of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.” For all these writers, their Peace Corps years were a time to learn the rules . . .

Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s (Bulgaria 1994-96) new book of stories, Cold Snap, has just been published with great reviews in Booklist and Foreward Magazine. Cindy is out of Boston and doing readings, interviews, and meeting up with Bulgarian RPCVs. First off is a trip to Chicago where on Friday she will be interviewed on Chicago Public Radio, and for the Chicago Tribune. Then there is a reading at a Bulgarian restaurant in Chi-town with RPCVs. The restaurant is called “Bulgaria.” Cindy will read, take questions, and sign books, and, oh, drink beer! You can learn more at: CAPCAfundraising@gmail.com Meanwhile read this great review of Cold Snap that appeared  in the Dallas Morning News over the weekend. It was written by Anne Morris, a Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News, and a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News Circle. It’s not unusual for a returning Peace Corps volunteer to write a book. So many have that it’s almost a subgenre. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s . . .

The Great “Peace Corps Novel” Several former Volunteers have written novels that come directly from their own experiences. The first of these “Peace Corps novel” by a PCV is Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. A third of that 1988 novel is set in Cameroon, where Smith served. In 1991 Richard Wiley published Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, a novel about a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea – Wiley’s country of assignment. Leaving Losapas by Roland Merullo, also published in 1991, is about the life of a Volunteer in Micronesia where Merullo served. Marnie Mueller’s first novel, Green Fires: Assault on Eden, A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rain-Forest, published in 1994, is about a PCV who returns to Ecuador with her new husband. Other Peace Corps-centered novels are Craig Carozzi’s The Road to El Dorado (1997), Susana Herrera’s Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an . . .

The Peace Corps Volunteer as character From the first days of the agency, Peace Corps Volunteers have been rich characters for novels not written by PCVs. The first books about the Peace Corps were young adult novels. In 1963, Breaking the Bonds: A Novel about the Peace Corps, written by Sharen Spence, had a short introduction by Sargent Shriver and was dedicated to “All Peace Corps Volunteers serving the world with discipline, determination, endurance, and a rare idealism.” This novel is set in Nigeria. Then in 1965 came a series of young adult novels entitled Kathy Martin: Peace Corps Nurse, about a Volunteer in Africa. Another “nursing novel” for a YA audience was written by Rachel G. Payes and published by Avalon Books in 1967. In 1968 came the most popular of all “Peace Corps novels,” The Zinzin Road, by the very successful commercial novelist and political writer, Fletcher Knebel, . . .

As Others See Us On September 9, 2001, on the 40th anniversary of the agency, The Washington Post reported that the Peace Corps community is “churning out enough works – thousands of memoirs, novels, and books of poetry – to warrant a whole new genre: Peace Corps Literature.” Also in 2001, Book Magazine wrote in the March/April issue about the literary movement of Peace Corps writers, quoting Paul Theroux, Bob Shacochis and Kent Haruf. Then there is the review that appeared in the November 2001 issue of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy about the collection of Peace Corps stories that were published in Living On The Edge. The reviewer was Patrick Shannon of Penn State University and he wrote. “None of the contributors are protagonists in their chapters, but each chapter is based on some event that the writer witnessed, experienced, or heard about. By telling the stories, the . . .

Poetry in the Peace Corps The intense cross cultural experience of the Peace Corps has produced in many PCVs a deep well of sentiment that has found its way, perhaps too easily, into poetry. Fortunately, this intense experience has also been a rich source of material for many fine published poets including Charlie Smith, Mark Brazaitis, Susan Rich,  Philip Dacey, Sandra Meek, Ann Neelon, Paul Violi, Keith Carthwright, Florence Chard Dacey,Lisa Chavez, Chris Conlon, John Flynn, Margaret Szumowski, Virginia Gilbert, Tony Zurlo, and many others. Poets, I believe, have been best able to explain the values of the Peace Corps experience as it relates to writing. Margaret Szumowski, who served in Uganda and Ethiopia, puts it this way: “I think the poet gains a great deal. She absorbs the sounds of other languages, takes in imagery never seen before, observes the way families operate compared to her own experience, sees the struggle other . . .

Peter Chilson’s recent fiction collection, Disturbance-Loving Species, won the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize in Short Fiction and Peace Corps Writers’ 2008 Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. He is the author of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, which won the nonfiction award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. His essays have twice appeared in Best American Travel Writing. Peter has also published in Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, The American Scholar, TheSmartSet, Audubon, The North American Review, Gulf Coast, and High Country News, where he was an editor. He teaches writing and literature at Washington State University and is working on a book about borderlands in Africa. • South of the Frontera: A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) iUniverse $22.95 313 pages March 2010 Reviewed by Peter Chilson (Niger 1985–87) IN 1975 LARRY LIHOSIT LOST HIS JOB and took off . . .

Reviewer Mark Brazaitis is the author of The Other Language: Poems (2009), winner of the ABZ Poetry Prize. He is also the author of three books of fiction, The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award; Steal My Heart, a novel that won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Writers; and An American Affair: Stories, winner of the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize. An audio version of one of his recent stories, “I Return,” is featured on the Cimarron Review’s Audio Library (http://cimarronreview.okstate.edu/169_sample3.html). • The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich (Niger 1984–86) White Pine Press $16.00 96 pages May 1, 2010 Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991–93) DON’T READ Susan Rich’s latest book on an empty stomach. Although The Alchemist’s Kitchen contains a wide, intelligent, and thought-provoking variety of poems, it does food better than most of the restaurants . . .

Christopher Conlon is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and an editor. His first book of verse, Gilbert and Garbo in Love, won the 2004 Peace Corps Writers Prize for Best Poetry Book, while his Midnight on Mourn Street was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association’s 2008 Bram Stoker Award in the category of 1st Novel. As an editor, Conlon won the 2009 Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology for his Richard Matheson tribute volume, He Is Legend, which is being reprinted by Tor in trade hardcover this September. Visit him online at ChristopherConlon.com. • The Gardener (Young Adult) by S.A. Bodeen (Tanzania 1989-90) [Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen] Feiwel and Friends May 2010 233 pages $16.99 Reviewed by Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988-90) WHAT IS “Young Adult” literature, anyway? Many think of Young Adult books simply as novels for kids, like the old “Juvenile” category some of us oldsters . . .

Writing from experience Anyone who has read Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, or John Dos Passos can see how they used the experience of living in France, England, and Spain as subject matter. In much the same way, Paul Theroux, Moritz Thomsen, Maria Thomas, Eileen Drew, Richard Wiley, P.F. Kluge, Bob Shacochis, Norm Rush, Marnie Mueller, Peter Hessler, George Packer, Kathleen Coskran, Mark Brazaitis, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Eileen Drew, Chris Conlon, Sandra Meek, Tom Hazuka, Jeanne D’Haem, Joseph Monninger, Leonard Levitt, Margaret Szumowski, Ann Neelon, Roland Merullo, Charles Larson, Susan Rich, Mike Tidwell, Susanna Herrera, Peter Chilson, Geraldine Kennedy, Rob Davidson, and hundreds of other Peace Corps writers have used Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe in their short stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction. While writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, they have broadened the landscape of American . . .

P.F. Kluge, the Writer in Residence at Kenyon College, author of the novel Eddie and The Cruisers, Biggest Elvis, and, most recently, Gone Tomorrow, as well as having two films based on his work, Dog Day Afternoon and Eddie And The  Cruisers, has a novel coming out this September from Overlook Press. This novel is set in the 1980’s and follows the life of  Hans Greifinger, a German-American who immigrated to the United States in 1928 and settled in New York and New Jersey. It is a story of him and his son, a nationally-syndicated travel writer. Askold Melnyczuk writes of the book, “Kluge knows his characters from the inside and his comic, loving portrayals stand with the best of Russo and Irving. Jersey has never seemed more exotic. Kluge entertains while provoking all the big questions about the meaning of origins and the search for home.”

A New Frontier Kennedy’s call to serve and his campaign theme of a “new frontier” appealed to the romantic impulse of many Volunteers. While social historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that our frontier was closed by the 1890s, America still responded to a hero, a lone hero against a corrupt world. This lone hero was dramatized during the 1950s in two classic western movies, “Shane” and “High Noon.” And like Alan Ladd in “Shane,” Peace Corps Volunteers still ride off into the sunset, saddlebags packed with idealism and a yearning for adventure, and the writers among them seek new experiences to write home about. An edge and an itch In my years of watching people join the Peace Corps, I have found that the most obvious PCV candidates are those who have an edge about them. They want more – whatever the more is – and are not satisfied with . . .

The Ugly Peace Corps Volunteer Then in 1958 came The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene J. Burdick. This book went through fifty-five printings in two years and was a direct motivation in creating the Peace Corps, as Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman points out in her history of the Peace Corps, All You Need Is Love. In a “Factual Epilogue” to the novel, Lederer and Burdick lay out the basic philosophy and modus operandi of what would later be the Peace Corps. Writing about how America should “help” developing countries, the authors declare: We do not need the horde of 1,500,000 Americans – mostly amateurs – who are now working for the United States overseas. What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working, and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and – in some cases – their health. They must go equipped to . . .

The Kennedy Kids in the Age of The Organization Man During the 1950s, two impulses swept across the United States. One impulse that characterized the decade was detailed in two best-selling books of the times: the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the non-fiction The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books looked at the “American way of life” and how men got ahead on the job and in society. Both are bleak looks at the corporate world. These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s philosophy as expressed in such novels as Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Her philosophy of Objectivism proposed reason as man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. Every man, according to Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to . . .

Farang (Poems) by Peter Blair (Thailand 1975–78) Autumn House Press $14.95 65 pages 2009 • The Verse of the Sword by RJ Huddy (Morocco 1981–83) xpatfiction $17.50 456 pages September 2009 • The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich (Niger 1984–86) White Pine Press $16.00 96 pages May 1, 2010 • A Peace Corps Memoir: Answering JFK’s Call by Terry Sack (Bolivia 1963–65) Createspace $15.95 458 pages April 2010 • Click on the book covers or the bold book titles to order from Amazon and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.