Peace Corps Worldwide

In the June issue of the publication BookPage there is a great review by Heather Seggel of  S.A. Bodeen (Tanzania 1989-90) [Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen] YA novel, The Gardener which we reviewed recently our website.www.http://old.peacecorpsworldwide.org/?s=Bodeen Seggel writes, “Author S.A.Bodeen has laced this sci-fi-tinged page-turner with thoughtful commentary on world hunger, sustainability, biology and biomedical ethics, plus several high-speed chases and a believable budding romance, and the whole thing works like a charm….I stayed up late to find out how it all ended, and stayed up after that because The Gardener raised so many timely and pointed questions.”

Travel Now, Write Later Anyone who has read The Sun Also Rises knows that this novel is also a wonderful travel book. Hemingway’s description of a bus trip to Spain is classic travel prose: “The road went along the summit of the Col and then dropped down, and the driver had to honk, and slow up, and turn out to avoid running into two donkeys that were sleeping in the road.” A trip like that in Spain in the 1920s is something most Volunteers can identify with today from their own overseas experiences. Paul Theroux, it is generally agreed, reinvented the art of travel writing with The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975. He returned the genre to the place it held when Mary Kingsley and Evelyn Waugh were crossing Africa and globe-trotting the world. Many Peace Corps writers have followed, most notably Mike Tidwell, Thurston Clarke, Jeffrey Tayler, Karen . . .

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 . . .