Peace Corps Worldwide

The September 14, 2009 issue of  The New Yorker has a long short story by Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) entitled, “The Lower River.”  The story is set in Malawi. A ‘volunteer’ at sixty returns to Africa. In the story, the narrator  wondered “if the people of Malabo might still remember what he had done there.” Theroux’s next novel is entitled, A Dead Hand. In it  Theroux returns to India with “a stylish and gripping novel of crime and obsession in Calcutta.” This is a novel that is being billed as “a dark and twisted narrative of obsession and need.”…. When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer’s block, receives a letter from a captivating and seductive American philanthropist with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son’s, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Who is the boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel . . .

Jack Godwin (Gabon 1982-84), who recently published Clintonomics, is off to Swansea University of Wales this spring for three weeks of lecturing on a Fulbright grant.  Jack will be speaking about his new book and meeting with officials of the local Welsh Assembly government to discuss international trade and economic development issues, as well as recruit Swansea students to study in California in conjunction with Sac State’s Global Education foreign exchange program.  Jack is the chief international officer and director of the Office of Global Education at Sac State.  His book, he says, “is a political science book, despite the name. It’s a book about the political economy. I compare Clinton’s and Reagan’s governing philosophies relative to the challenges we face in the global era.” This is Godwin’s fourth Fulbright and his last one.  “I am honored but I am also really disappointed because there’s a law, there’s a rule, . . .

Here’s what iUniverse’s  “product description” says of novel Tanga, written by Eric Madeen, an RPCV from Gabon and  currently an associate professor of English at Tokyo City University. After reading this “product description” you can’t say RPCVs lack imagination! TANGA is a novel of forbidden love set in a rain forest village in the heart of Africa. It seamlessly merges adventure, romance, and the psycho-thriller while deconstructing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with David undergoing the Kurtz syndrome — to a lesser degree, of course. Like Kurtz, David enters the heart of “blackest” Africa as a white man, and as a Peace Corps volunteer of genuine idealism, he finds himself both “corrupted by” and also empathizing with the Africans he becomes involved with, and tempted to “go native.” In sum, TANGA is an irresistible love story. From the moment David sees Assam naked in the stream, right up through his final . . .

If the Peace Corps did anything, it turned us into readers and we are better for it. But being a reader doesn’t make us writers. That’s the rub. Having a great (or not so great) Peace Corps experience doesn’t turn us into writers, either, though it might help when it comes to the story told. Being an English major doesn’t make one a writer, and it can even hurt an RPCV writer, having read (and then trying to write like) one of those great writers from lit classes. What I’ve seen editing PeaceCorpsWriters are a lot of self-published books that have very limited value and aren’t well written. For example, some RPCVs think that they can collect all those letters home, slap them together, add a few grainy black-and-white-photos, and have a book. Rarely, are those Letters Home worth reading by anyone outside of the family. The other Peace Corps . . .

Rob Davidson (Grenada 1990-92), who served with his wife on the island of Carriacou, and who went onto earn his doctoral candidate in American literature at Purdue University, is the author of a collection of stories entitled Field Observations that won the Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Award a few years back, and he has a new honor to his credit. Camber Press just announced the winner of the first annual Camber Press Fiction Chapbook Award. It is Rob Davidson’s entry entitled “Criminals” chosen by writer Ron Carlson from among a group of unidentified submissions. Davidson, a resident of Chico, California, sets his story on the small Caribbean island of Carriacou. Our distant, academic narrator takes us to this island where goats outnumber people two to one. Natives practice grudges, judgments, stubbornness, and things are never as simple as right or wrong. More accurately, they’re about how one resolves issues within the . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .