Peace Corps writers

Interesting Times: Writing from a Turbulent Decade by George Packer (Togo 1982–83) is published this month from Farrar Straus Giroux. It comes out on November 17, but the book is in stores now. Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two works of nonfiction, The Village of Waiting, which is his Peace Corps memoir, and Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the 2001 Peace Corps Writers Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award. His play Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. His reporting has also won four Overseas Press Club . . .

Interesting Times Writing from a Turbulent Decade by George Packer (Togo 1982-83) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00 409 pages November 2009 The Incarnation of CatMan Billy By Will Jordan (Senegal & Liberia 1971-72) The Press of Light, $12.99 September 2009 The Broken Teaglass By Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) Delacorte Press, $25.00 370 pages September 2009 By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard (poetry) by Philip Brady (Zaire 1980-82) University of Tennessee Press, $29.95 180 pages November 2008 Joe & Azat By Jesse Lonergan (Turkmenistan 2005-07) ComicsLit, $10.95 95 pages November 2009 At the Table of Want (A Novel) by Larry Kimport (Malaysia 1980-82) Foremost Press, $16.95 338 pages October 2009

The reviewer, Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) is a writer and magazine editor of ECS Nepal, and has published both in the United States and abroad, including non-fiction several books. Here Don reviews James Ciullo’s (Venezuela 1969-71) novel, Maracaibo, that mixes Washington D.C. and international politics with Columbian mercenary intrigue and Venezuelan oil. • Maracaibo by James Ciullo (Venezuela 1969–71) Mainly Murder Press September 2009 312 pages $15.95 Reviewed by Don Messerschmidt, (Nepal 1963-65) If you like fast-paced mystery novels filled with political intrigue in esoteric international settings, with an ex-Peace Corps volunteer character who has gone on (years later) to become a respected US Senator who becomes unwittingly mixed up with assassination and mayhem…, then this is a book for you. At first I thought it was a bit over the top. Could any of this happen? I asked myself. The characters in this novel are too wild (and one . . .

Monica Mills (PC/W Staff 1995–01) was the Associate Director at the Peace Corps overseeing recruitment; she also ran the Recruiting Office for the Mid-Atlantic region from 1995 to 1999. At Bread for the World since 2006, Monica has led major efforts on reform of the farm bill and the way the U.S. delivers foreign assistance. Here she reviews another PC/W staff member Hal Fleming’s novel The Brides’ Fair. • The Brides’ Fair by Hal Fleming (PC/W Staff 1966-68) PublishAmerica May 2008 212 pages $24.95 Reviewed by Monica Mills (PC/W Staff 1995–01) A strong sense of foreboding permeates the book The Brides’ Fair by Hal Fleming. A wonderful premise, Fleming chooses a local, annual event where women are chosen as brides in the Mid-Atlas Mountains for his story.  Disparate characters come together at the fair from Americans around the U.S. embassy, to women from a tribal village, to Arab police officers-even . . .

Rajiv Joseph (Senegal 1996-98) the playwright of Animals Out of Paper, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Gruesome Playground Injuries, has won the 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award in the playwriting category. He joins Mike Meyer (China 1995–97) another recipient of the award. A total of ten awards were given this year and RPCVs won two of them. The awards, which are $50,000 each, totaling $500,000, have been given annually since 1985 to writers “of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Rajiv is the author of Animals Out of Paper, produced by the Second Stage Theatre and published by Dramatists Play Service; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, produced at the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles and named Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts; and Gruesome Playground Injuries, currently playing at the Alley Theatre in Houston. He has received a . . .

Joe & Azat by Jesse Lonergan (Turkmenistan 2005-07) is a graphic novel coming out next month. It is based loosely on Lonergan’s Peace Corps experience in the former Soviet Republic. This graphic novel is about an “American Joe” who finds in Turkmenistan a good friend, Azat, who is a Turkman dreamer. The novel is full of desert cab rides, vodka shots, secret girlfriends, and Turkman’s business schemes. Reviewers write that “Lonergan captures not only the bizarreness of living in a country where the president for life launches copies of his poetry books into space, outlaws gold teeth and renames the months and days, but also reveals that there is hope in seemingly hopeless situations.” Lonergan is the writer and artist of the novel and creates an “eternally optimistic and enthusiastic Turkmen who has an idealized view of America, plus grandiose dreams of business success and romantic love.” Sound familiar? Azat is a great character. . . .

RPCV Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) and author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, published by Walker & Company in 2008 has been named a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers’  Award, one of ten given this year. The award, worth $50,000, is given annually to ” writers of exceptional talent and promise.”  Mike, who will receive the award this evening, is leaving shortly for China to work on his next book. Whiting Writers’ Awards candidates are proposed by anonymous nominators from across the country. And the winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation.  The Foundation accepts nominations only from the designated nominators. This year’s winners include several who have just published or will soon publish a first book. Although some were born in such far-flung places . . .

While the Peace Corps writers from Africa have produced many memoirs from their experiences overseas, RPCV writers from Latin America are sadly far behind.  Nevertheless, some great memoirs were written by Latin American Vols. While I have to eliminate Green Fires: Assault on Eden, A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rain-Forest, written by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65), I would have to say there is a lot of memories of her tour are in this novel.  Another very fine book, and a memoir, and one of the very first books on the Peace Corps by PCVs, was The Barrios of Manta: A Personal Account of the Peace Corps in Ecuador published in 1965 and written by Rhoda & Earle Brooke (Ecuador 1962-64). Early PCV, Paul Cowen (Ecuador 1966-67), did write his memoir The Making Of An Un-American: A Dialogue with Experience. It was published in 1970. There is some claim to being a Peace Corps Memoir in Craig . . .

Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) first novel received a short but glowing review in the New York Times Book Review section on Sunday, November 18. In the Crime column, Marilyn Stasio writes “In her author’s bio we learn that Emily Arsenault wrote this first novel to pass the long, quiet nights in the South African village where she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. The comfort she took from words–funny words, strange words, words that should have been strangled at birth–is palpable in her oddly endearing coming-of-age story about a recent college graduate who lands a job as an apprentice lexicographer and discovers clues to an unsolved murder embedded in the citation files.”

Naming the best memoir by an RPCV who served in Africa has stirred some interest. A number of first rate books have been cited, from Mike Tidwell (Zaire 1985-87)  The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn published in 1991, to Kris Holloway’s Monique and the Mango Rains that came out in 2006. What we are seeking is a memoir of the Peace Corps experience, not fiction. Readers seem not to remember a few other good books published by RPCVs. Jason Carter’s account, for example, of being a PCV in South Africa entitled Power Lines published by National Geographic Books in 2002, or  Jeanne D’Haem’s (Somalia 1968-70) charming The Last Camel: True Stories About Somalia published by Red Sea Press in 1997, or even Mango Elephants in the Sun by Susana Herrera (Cameroon 1992-94) put out by Shambhala Publications in 1999. Selecting the best book is not easy. Very few readers remember the late Tim McLaurin (Tunisia . . .

I am very impressed that so many ( actually only two) RPCVs had anything to say about the “Great  Peace Corps novel” so let’s see what we can generate regarding ‘other’ books about the Peace Corps Experience: Peace Corps Memoirs.  God knows we have more than a few academic and commercial books, as well as, self published books of what the Peace Corps was like going back to the first days of the agency.  The very first Peace Corps memoir (written by an RPCV) is Arnold Zeitlin’s To the Peace Corps with Love published by Doubleday in 1965. Zeitlin was a PCV with the first group of Volunteers to Ghana, in 1961. Zeitlin had been a young reporter before going into the Peace Corps, and after his tour he was a journalist all his life, living around the world until his recent retirement. Another journalist, after his Peace Corps years, is Leonard Levitt. He wrote a terrific book, An African . . .

Will Siegel is a technical writer who also writes fiction and who also served in Ethiopia with Marian Haley Beil and myself back in the day (1962–64). Will went to San Francisco State for his masters degree in creative writing and lived there during the summer of love (and lots more) before moving to New York City, and next to Boston where he has lived for the last twenty plus years. Then and now, he is a fine writer and one of the sweetest guys we know and here he reviews Larry Wonderling’s (PC Staff: COR Puerto Rico 1968–70; Afghanistan 1970-73; early ’80s Central and Latin America; late ’80s Africa) book on a tender and tough spot in San Francisco. San Francisco Tenderloin: True Stories of Heroes, Demons, Angels, Outcasts & a Psychotherapist Expanded Second Edition By Larry Wonderling, Ph.D. Cape Foundation Publications 415 Pages $24.95 Reviewed by William Siegel (Ethiopia 1962-64) Larry . . .

In the first days and years of the Peace Corps there were many books written by people who had never been PCVs, never worked for the agency, never worked overseas, and never volunteer for anything, but were academics or free lance writers who saw a great new subject areas that they could write about, especially since no one knew anything about who, what, where, when and how the Peace Corps might develop or what would happen to all those bright young people joining up and going off to live in the middle of nowhere.  A small cottage industry of ‘Peace Corps books’ began in the publishing world at a time when there were no Volunteers. Over the years I have haunted yard sales and bookstores and now the Internet  and have collected enough of those books to cause my wife to roll her eyes whenever I come home clutching another history or anthropological study of the first Peace Corps years. The best books, of . . .

Jack Allison served a 3-year tour with the Peace Corps in Malawi where he was a public health Volunteer in the bush. Here he reviews Thomas Howell’s book Allah’s Gardenon Morocco based on Hollowell’s brief tour as a PCV, and now his extended connection with the country. • Allah’s Garden by Thomas Hollowell (Morocco 2002) Tales Press March 2009 198  pages $14.95 Reviewed by Jack Allison (Malawi 1967–69) Thomas Hollowell’s novel is actually a multi-layered reportage of his fascination with Morocco which resulted in a very brief stint as a Volunteer with the US Peace Corps there in 2002, including an historical denouement of the war in the Western Sahara, and a focused account of the capture, torture, and epic struggle of a Moroccan physician, Azeddine Benmansour, who spent 24 years as a prisoner of the terrorist group, the Polisario.  Azeddine is one of the longest-held POWs ever. The novel . . .