Married to Amazement: A Memoir, by Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 1965-67)

Married to Amazement is both a memoir and a celebration of the life passages we all experience with a brush of wonder and amazement. It’s not a Pollyanna approach, there is loss and error here, nobody escapes pain, but the foundational gifts of author Kathleen Coskran’s life have been wonder, through undeserved luck, she says, and an instinct for paying attention. Like Mary Oliver, Coskran too doesn’t “… want to end up having simply visited this world.”

The first essay quotes a fellow Ethiopia Peace Corps Volunteer who, every day, spread his arms wide as they walked down “a clay road that sucked at our shoes in the rainy season and streaked our clothes with dust in the dry season,” and proclaimed, “So This is Paris!” The essays that follow celebrate the joy of becoming a parent (with five children born in five countries on three continents), the love of travel, yes, but more importantly, the understanding that for her and her husband, Chuck, living and working in, not just visiting, Ethiopia, Kenya, China, Nepal . . . and Minnesota were the source of deep satisfaction and connection. She also includes essays that acknowledge and celebrate, “that final human experience, death.”

She ends with the realization that the third Peace Corps goal, “to help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans” was the gift, the amazing gift, that formed and transformed her life. “We speak different languages,” she writes, “eat different foods, have different practices and opinions, but we share this beautiful, fragile planet and must continue to learn, to see, and to listen to one another.”

Those words are more important than ever in these fragile times.

About the Author

Kathleen Coskran is a writer, teacher, and retired Principal of Lake Country School in Minneapolis. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia where she met her future husband, Chuck Coskran, also a Peace Corps Volunteer. After two years in Washington, D.C., they returned to east Africa where Chuck served as Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in Kenya. In 2006 they spent six months teaching at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. She also volunteered for a month at Brighter Futures Children’s Home, in Bistechap, Nepal, a village of 79 households southeast of Kathmandu. She posts her version of flash fiction on her blog, Pocket Stories, https: //pocketstories-kcoskran.blogspot.com/2011/04/welcome.html

Married to Amazement: A Memoir is available on Amazon.com.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Peace Corps Writers

Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 24, 2025

ISBN-10: ‎ 1950444813