Peace Corps Worldwide – Page 404 – promoting Peace Corps writers since 1989

Self-Publish Your Peace Corps Story Or Not?

Sep 11 2009

I have been writing the occasional blog about self-published books, mostly as a way of encourage people to write them, and while encouraging them to write, to suggest–urge–that they get a good editor (or 2) to work on their prose and poetry. Writing good prose is not easy and it takes a lot of work just to write one good sentence, let alone two good sentences. Lauri Anderson (Nigeria 1965-67) a creative writing professor as well as a novelist dropped me a note recently that I think adds to my discussion about self-published books. Here is what Lauri has to say: “I have read a few fine books that were self-published. An RPCV friend at the University of Michigan Flint self-published a novel that I read from cover to cover and enjoyed. One of my favorite travel books was self-published. For every one such well-written self-published book there are hundreds of mediocre . . .

A PCV Death In Tanzania

Sep 09 2009

In the fall of 1964, just back from Ethiopia and working for the Division of Volunteer Support, I met Peverley Dennett and Bill Kinsey during their training program at Syracuse University. Bill had been assigned to Malawi and Peppy [as Peverley was called] to Tanzania. In those early years of Peace Corps Training groups were often trained together on college campuses, but that decision was changed because too many Trainees from different projects were meeting up and falling in love. The Peace Corps might be the “greatest job you’ll ever love” but the Peace Corps didn’t want you “falling in love” during Training.] Bill and Peverley were two young goodlooking kids just out of college. Bill, as I recall, had a bright smile, blond hair cut into a crew cut, an All-American looks. Peverley was sweet and shy and very pretty. They were the picture of what Peace Corps Volunteers . . .

Everyone Needs an Editor [Not just me]

Sep 09 2009

Some of you might have read about Tess Gallagher [the widow of Raymond Carver, and his second wife] who wants to publish 17 of Carver’s original short stories. Carver was a minimalist [A literary style exemplifying economy and restraint], and his most successful collection of stories, and what put ‘minimalist’ on the map, was entitled, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was published by Knopf in ’81 and edited by Gordon Lish, the prince of minimalist editors. Gallagher, herself a well known writer and poet, wants to publish her late husband’s stories as they were original written. Carver, who died in ’88 at 50, had tried to set the record straight himself. According to an article in The New York Times [The Arts Section, on Wednesday, October 17, 2007] “He restored and republished five of the stories” and published them in a collection entitled, Where I’m . . .

Review: Award Winner The Baker's Boy By Barry Kitterman

Sep 08 2009

Poet Ann Neelon teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Murray State University and edits New Madrid magazine. Here she reviews The Baker’s Boy by Barry Kitterman — winner of the 2009 Maria Thomas Peace Corps Writers Award for Fiction. • The Baker’s Boy by Barry Kitterman (Belize 1976–78) Southern Methodist University Press 2008 336 pages $22.50 Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978–79) In reading Barry Kitterman, I find myself rediscovering the pleasures of reading Dostoyevsky — admittedly an extravagant claim in response to a first novel. Like Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot and/or The Possessed, The Baker’s Boy constitutes a powerful work of moral imagination. Brothers Albert and Junie and their cohorts-including Broke-hand, Mouse, Snot, Milkboy, Corky, Cowboy, Whiteboy, Redboy, Bigboy, Leeboy, and Blackboy-are no choir boys, as Tanner Johnson, their teacher at the New Hope School, duly notes (this despite the fact that Albert and . . .

Taking It On The Chin: Handling Literary Critics

Sep 07 2009

I am amused when first time published writers, usually self published vanity authors, get all testy with me when their writing is criticized, even lambasted, by one of our reviewers on this site, or by yours truly. Having been in this game of writing for some forty years, with 25 plus books published, I have had my fair share (actually, more than my fair share) of bad reviews, put downs, and slam dunks from critics and good friends. This last weekend I came across a wonderful collection of put downs and slam dunks by writers. The book is entitled W.O.W.: Writers On Writing,edited by Jon Winoku and published first in 1986 by Running Press Books of Philadelphia. There are many back-and-forths about Truman Capote who really bought the acid tongues out in other writers. Everyone picked on poor Truman. Here’s a sample of some of the snide remarks that the . . .

The Rules For Writing A Peace Corps Book

Sep 02 2009

There are no rules. And that is what is so great about writing a book. A friend, a successful writer/editor/creative writing professor and RPCV, has been reading my blogs on “Peace Corps books” and she sent me these wise words on how Peace Corps writers should go about the task of writing a book. Her list: Hopeful Peace Corps writers should take writing courses from reputable instructors to learn the basics and to have the opportunity to workshop their writing among peers. They should also read lots of good How-To books on the craft. There are a gazzillion of them out there. They should avoid at all costs: exclamation points, stereotyping, cliches, and all other proofs of lazy writing. They should plan on revising each chapter or piece at least ten times. Quality writing is all about revision. They should NOT confuse explicit, titillating, borderline-pornographic sex scenes with “intimacy” with . . .

RPCV Mystery Writer Phillip Margolin Speaking In Central Oregon

Sep 01 2009

Author and former criminal defense attorney Phillip Margolin will speak in Central Oregon. This is a piece that appeared today (September 1, 2009) in The Bulletin by David Jasper. It is an interview with Phillip Margolin (Liberia 1966-68) one of the more successful RPCV writers. • “Good afternoon, law offices,” says a receptionist for author Phillip Margolin, focus of Deschutes Public Library’s Celebrate Oregon Author series for the month of September. The Portland-based writer of 14 best-sellers may have stepped away from a 25-year career as an attorney back in 1996, but that didn’t mean he was going to surrender his office. “I just kept my old office,” says Margolin, 65. “I like having a place to come … to. For me, it’s nicer to have an office. There’s just a lot of stuff I do downtown. I work out downtown … take coffee breaks and snacks and lunch.” He’ll . . .

A Thousand Words To Create One Good Sentence

Sep 01 2009

They tell a story of Thomas Wolfe when he lived in New York on First Avenue. Late one night the writer Nancy Hale, who lived on East 49th Street near Third Avenue, heard a kind of chant, which grew louder. She got out of bed and looked out of the window at two or three in the morning and there was the great figure of Thomas Wolfe, advancing in his long countryman’s stride, with his swaying black raincoat. As he went striding down the dark city street, he was chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today – I wrote ten thousand words today.” Well, wait until his editor Maxwell Perkins got hold of it! There are stories of how Maxwell Perkins would arrive in Wolfe’s Village apartment–where Wolfe wrote standing up, using the top of the refrigerator as his desk–and Perkins would take boxloads of handwritten prose away with him, saying, “you’re done . . .

Peace Corps Ex-Staffers Do COS On Madoff

Aug 31 2009

In today’s Counterpunch (edited by Alex Cockburn) Pam Martens writes about the “long-awaited investigative report by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Inspector General on how the SEC bungled multiple investigations of Bernard Madoff.” According to Martens, the team that produced this report on one of the most long-running and convoluted frauds in the history of Wall Street included Inspector General H. David Kotz who came to the SEC-IG post in December 2007 after five years as Inspector General and Associate General Counsel for the Peace Corps. The Deputy Inspector General, Noelle Frangipane, also came to the SEC from the Peace Corps where she had served as Director of Policy and Public Information.” At home and abroad, the Peace Corps cleans up the mess!

Reading Poets & Writers

Aug 31 2009

Reading the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of Poets & Writers, a magazine that claims it goes from “from inspiration to publication” I was struck by the numerous ads for writing programs, MFAs, on-line degrees, and workshops given by colleges and universities. While the ads claims to be about teaching writing, what they seem to be suggesting is destination travel. For example, the full page ad for Chatham University in Pittsburgh has a woman with her laptop (by the way most of these ads feature laptops. What happened to pen-and-pencil and yellow pads?) sitting on cliffs high over the Monongahela or the Allegheny, the two rivers that dissect the rustbelt city. Now Chatham College (as it is well known) is up in the hills, miles from the polluted waters of the rivers that made this old industrial town famous before the turn of the last century. Nevertheless, this co-ed is watching white caps under the scripted selling . . .

Former Peace Corps CD Andrew Oerke To Receive Club Of Rome Lifetime Achievement Award

Aug 27 2009

On November 18, 2009, Andrew Oerke (PC/Staff in Tanzania & Uganda, and CD in Malawi and Jamaica from 1966-71) will be presented with the USA Club of Rome Lifetime Achievement Awards for his latest collections of poems, Songs of Africa, published in English and Bulgarian by PSP & Fakel in Sofia, Bulgaria. The presentation will be made at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Andrew is the 2006 winner of the Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Poetry Book. He also received the United Nations Artists and Writer’s Association award for Literature for his two volumes African Stiltdancer and San Miguel de Allende. Besides his time with the Peace Corps, Andrew worked on microcredit projects in more than 60 nations around the world. Of his poetry, noted literary critic Harold Bloom has written, “Oerke’s eye is shrewd, his mind capacious, and his generosity toward humankind is endless. His poems, whether set in Africa, . . .

New Fiction From John Givens

Aug 27 2009

John Givens (Korea 1967-69) has a story in The Mississippi Review currently online at http://www.mississippireview.com. The Mississippi Review is published by the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. The story is about a rogue samurai solving problems in the 17th century entitled, “The Buddha-nature of the House: John is from Northern California and earned his BA in English literature at the California State University Fresno and his MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. [John is one of many fine Peace Corps writers who attended the famous Iowa writing program. The RPCV writers include Phil Damon (Ethiopia 1963-65), who, I believe, was the first RPCV in the program, Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69), and most recently Matt Davis (Mongolia 2001-03).] Afterwards John studied language and art in Kyoto for four years, then worked as a writer & editor in Tokyo for . . .

RPCV Observes Election Day In Lizrazhd

Aug 26 2009

After his Peace Corps service in Turkey (1965-67), Ken Hill was a staff member who left the Peace Corps in 1975 to pursue personal business interests. In the mid-90s he and his wife Winnie (Nepal 1966-68) returned to Peace Corps where Ken was Country Director first for the Russian Far East, then Bulgaria and Macedonia. In 1999 he became Chief of Operations for Peace Corps programs in Europe and Asia and was appointed Chief of Staff of Peace Corps during 2001. Now retired, Ken is engaged in numerous volunteer and political activities. He is active in local and Virginia politics, on the Boards of the Bulgarian-American Society and the Friends of Turkey and the Alexandria, Virginia Sister Cities Committee with Gyumri, Armenia. He was an advisor to the Obama / Peace Corps Transition Team and is a former Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Peace Corps Association.” When . . .

Peace Corps Writer On President's Short Summer Reading List

Aug 26 2009

RPCV Kent Haruf’s (Turkey 1965-67) novel, Plainsong is one of the five books the President is reading this summer. The book is described on the jacket as a masterful detailing of unsettled lives, bound by their windswept town and landscape — “their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant.” Slate’s political writer, John Dickerson, “analyzed” the list and said that Haruf’s book was the only one that showed “geographical and literary diversity.” The other four books are: The Way Home, by George Pelecanos Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Tom Friedman Lush Life, by Richard Price John Adams, by David McCullough

Picking On Peace Corps Staff

Aug 25 2009

Emailing today with an RPCV from Ethiopia, I started to recall the ‘famous’ first staff at the agency and the long-time tradition in the Peace Corps of official boondoggle trips overseas to ‘see’ PCVs, but really were just so the Washington Staff could get out of D.C. and on the government’s dime see something of the Third World. Theroux wrote about those Visiting Washington Officials in some of his early writings from Malawi. This sort of junket was also captured wonderfully by short-term Peace Corps Evaluator Fletcher Knebel in his 1966 novel on the Peace Corps, The Zinzin Road. Knebel’s PC/W character was Maureen Sutherland, “…a slim, willowy young woman, stylishly dressed…She wore elongated dark glasses, and a sheaf of black hair fell loosely over one eye. Her skin, as creamy as enameled china, hinted of regular facials and a variety of expensive oils and ointments.” Sutherland’s character was based on a legendary African Region Desk Officer of . . .