John Coyne Babbles

Bad Books Written by Good RPCVs

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.

Then there is the problem of too many books being published. In 2006, there were 42,000 novels published, up 17% from 2005. Altogether, there were 291,000 new titles and editions published in 2006. Add that number to all those POD books (print-on-demand) books that anyone can get published for a few hundred dollars and the dream of being an "author."

What I see at 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.

The other Peace Corps genre, if you want to call it that, are journals kept and published as memoirs. You know, you really have to be a pretty good writer to make a book like that of interest to anyone beyond you and your family. They do have value as historical documents, and might someday be extremely useful to someone researching the Peace Corps, but seldom are they worth reading for enjoyment or information.

I can pick up a 'Peace Corps book' and know within two or three pages if the book is worth reading. It has to be, first of all, stylistically interesting. It needs interesting sentences, a new idea, and vivid descriptions. I need to sense that the writer is in control of his or her language and the story that they are telling.

For example here is an example of a good opening, written with vivid language: "It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon when the train reached Awash station in the fierce African heat. The plain was white with dust. In the distance a few antelope and gazelle grazed on the dun-colored grass growing along the volcanic rock that littered the ballast bed. The steel rails shone like knives in the sunlight and bisected the plain as straight and true as a plumb line."

This writing is something that cannot be taught. If you don't have that gift, you can't learn it.

That said, I have come across examples of self-published books about the Peace Corps that are fascinating in their simple narrative power. They prove the exception to the rule. One was a journal kept by a young, innocent Peace Corps doctor, Milt Kogan, in Ouagadougou, Upper Volta,(Burkina Faso) back in the early 70s. The other book is a collection of letters written home from Gemu Gofa, Ethiopia, by a young couple--Sue and Brad Coady--who spent the first three years of their married life in the remote southern region of the Empire. These letters were collected, edited, and self published by Irma Grigg, the woman's mother, as a labor of love, as a gesture of pride in what her daughter and new son-in-law had achieved, and they were Super Vols in Southern Ethiopia.

Both books came to me by chance and, I realize, that out there in attics and basements, and forgotten in back rooms of local libraries, are more tales by Peace Corps Volunteers or staff, all of them small treasures that someday, I hope, will find an audience. But if not, if they are only read by the sons and daughters and grandchildren, well then, we'll teaching our own about the Peace Corps and what we were doing years before they were dreams in their mothers' eyes.

 

E-Mailed Any Good Books Lately?

Way back when...I was working in the Peace Corps and one of my jobs was to interview PCVs who had ETed. This was in late '64 and early '65 and I remember this blond surfer guy coming in for his exit interview. He couldn't wait to get out of the Peace Corps, having been overseas (I think Malawi) for a matter of weeks. What went wrong, I remember asking him. Books, he said. Books? Now that was a new one on me. I waited for him to explain, which he was happy to do. He went onto describe how all the PCVs he ran into carried thick paperbacks and whenever there was a moment of 'downtime' they'd pulled out the paperback and start reading. He kept shaking his head, looking worried, and confessing, "I didn't want that to happen to me."

Here, clearly, was not a reader.

I thought about him when I read the results of the recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) entitled To Read or Not to Read. According to the NEA reading in America is in serious trouble. Take kids. Fewer than one-third of thirteen-year-olds read for pleasure everyday--a 14 % decline from two decades ago--while the percentage of seventeen-year-old non-readers doubled over the same period. Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four watch television about two hours a day, the study reveals, but read for only seven minutes. Americans are reading fewer books of fiction, poetry, and plays.

One of the reasons kids say they don't read is because it is "lonely." They like text messaging, playful and interactive and connected with friends.

Remember when you were in college and 'talked about books' and everyone was reading the same book and discussing it? Well, that happens today only in reading clubs and perhaps with movies. No one sits around and talks about literature, or at least not my crowd.

Novelist Audrey Niffenegger (she wrote The Time Traveler's Wife) thinks the reason is because novelists aren't giving readers narratives. Writers are giving the reader less and less and making them work harder and harder. "People got the idea," she said, "that everything was going to be like Finnegans Wake, and everyone just said, 'Okay, we're going to the movies.'"

In Poets & Writers Magazine I read how a former Random House executive, Susan Danziger, and her techie husband, have come up with a clever idea that might get people reading novels. They have a new website that e-mails serialized installments of classic books to readers every day. The website is  DailyLit. They launched it last May and so far they provide readers free delivery of over four hundred books that, by virtue of their age, have become part of the public domain, including six different Mark Twain titles, fifteen by Charles Dickens, and twenty-six by Shakespeare. They are also adding recently published books. The titles are e-mailed in small installments (approximately a thousand words) that Danziger says most readers will be able to finish in "under five minutes." DailyLit also features on-line forums in which readers can discuss books as they're delivered.

Readers can browse DailyLit's offerings by title, author, and genre; once they've selected a title, they can then choose to receive an e-mail every day, only on weekends, or three times a week, as well as the time at which they want to be emailed during each prescribed day.

Check out: http://www.dailylit.com/

More About Kluge

This coming fall Overlook Press will publish P.F.Kluge's (Micronesia 1967-69)next novel--his 10th--Gone Tomorrow. They will also re-publishing Kluge's famous second novel, Eddie And The Cruisers. If you check out his site: http://www.pfkluge.com you'll learn a lot about Fred Kluge and see  how one RPCV has made a living as a writer. On the site, Fred talks about books into film. In part, this is what he has to say:

"I've seen my own work turned into movies," writes Fred. "And, though writers are fashionably leery about Hollywood, I'm not: a certain amount of magic, and money, has come into my life from films."

In August, 1967, two reporters from LIFE Magazine-- Fred being one--were assigned to reconstruct a bank robbery that had just occurred in Brooklyn. It was a botched enterprise which evolved into tense and occasionally comic hostage situation. One of the robbers was a gay male who wanted to finance his lover's sex change operation. Their article, 'The Boys in the Bank'--led to Dog Day Afternoon, with Al Pacino, Jonathan Cazale and Chris Sarandon.

"I was on Saipan when the film came out," recalls Kluge. "I flew to Guam to see what had become of a story that began as a magazine assignment. The film was not my work; it had evolved and mutated into something else. But there’s an old saying I like—writer to movie producer: “Where were you when the pages were blank?” Dog Day Afternoon is a film I respected without especially liking, at least that first time. The years have been kind to it, though, and it holds up well.

"Rock and roll, oldies but goodies, youth and age, then and now: all these figured in my second novel, Eddie And The Cruisers. And more: the power of memory, the importance of memory, the tenacity of music. Eddie And The Cruisers is a cult classic, a likable film. It generates far more mail—and far less money—than Dog Day Afternoon. But a lot of people love it.When movie interest comes along, you know your work will change. “If you sell a cow to a butcher,” I wisecracked, “will it change?” But I’m not really that cynical. The measure of a novel is in thousands of readers; a movie reaches millions. So there’s magic, more in Eddie than in Dog Day. And money—more in Dog Day than in Eddie. And money buys freedom and freedom is time to write."

When Fred isn't writing he's teaching creative writing at Kenyon College, and when he isn't teaching or writing novels, he is often on assignment from the National Geographic Traveler. In the upcoming March issue of the magazine he has piece on Karlovy Vary, aka Karisbad, Czech Republic. So, half of the year he is in Ohio on a lovely college campus, and then he takes off and travels the world. Not a bad way to make a living as a writer. Check out his site for more background on Fred Kluge:

http://www.pfkluge.com/

RPCV Writer Peter Chilson Wins Book Award

Peter Chilson (Niger 1985-87) is the winner of the 2006 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction. It was awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College for his collection Disturbance-Loving Species. This award was established in 1995 to expand Bread Loaf Writers' Conference's commitment to the support of emerging writers. Winning manuscripts are chosen in an open national competition by a distinguished judge, and then published  by Houghton Mifflin Company in Mariner paperback original. This collection has just been published.

Among other honors, Peter was awarded the Gulf Coast Prize for fiction for his story "American Food" and his previous book, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, won the Associated Writing Programs Award for creative non-fiction. Peter teaches creative writing and literature at Washington State University. He lives in Moscow, Idaho and Portland, Oregon.

In his Acknowledgements, Peter thanks Rich Wandschneider(Turkey 1965-67) director of Fishtrap, an institute for writing in Oregon, who gave Peter a two-month residency and a cabin in the Wallowa Mountains, where he began to write this book. Another example of Peace Corps writers helping each other. Nicely done, Peter.

Gatsby Lives!

You might have seen the first page piece written by Sara Rimer in the New York Times on Sunday, February 17, 2008 about high school students (mostly smart immigrant kids going to schools like Boston Latin) who are reading The Great Gatsby and connecting with Fitzgerald's 1925 novel and the famous image at the end of the book where F. Scott writes about the "green light" that lured the Dutch settler to the new land.

What struck me was not so much their interpretation of the famous ending of the book, but that Fitzgerald was even being read by this generation of first- and second-generation immigrants in America.

As the TIMES article points out Gatsby, the novel, "had fallen into near obscurity" by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940. It came back into vogue in the 1950s and 1960s when a trade paperback version was reissued. But also because of the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald written by Nancy Milford and published in 1970. I remember working as a college dean and having students discovering that Zelda had a husband who wrote novels!

Then in 1974 there was Robert Redford playing Gatsby and the novel had another life. Today over a half million copies are sold yearly, mostly to high school and college students.

In this article about high school students reading Gatsby in Boston, the common dream (the 'green light') of these kids is getting into Harvard, doing their parents proud, making money in America. (Which, of course, is not how Fitzgerald saw the 'green light.') None of the students talk (or dream) about Daisy Buchanan. What also is not mentioned are two other aspects of The Great Gatsby that make it one of the great American novels, that is (1) the structure and (2) Fitzgerald's use of language.

The novelist and short story writer Irwin Shaw wrote a  piece two dozen years ago about studying the original manuscript of Gatsby and being stunned by all the beautiful passages F. Scott dropped from the text so that the book would be a well made novel. (Anyone wanting to learn how to write a novel would do well to read and re-read Gatsby. There's not a false step in the structure of this book.)

Edmund Wilson, who wrote some of America's best literary criticism, went to school with Fitzgerald, and was brighter than F.Scott, but could not write a sentence with half the charm and grace and power of his friend. Few writers can match F. Scott's gift even today.

Before The Great Gatsby was published, Jeffrey Meyers in his biography of Scott Fitzgerald, writes how Ring Lardner, F.Scott's drinking buddy out in Great Neck, Long Island, where Fitzgerald was living when writing Gatsby, and knew how careless Fitzgerald and his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, were, so he took the proofs of the novel and read it for mistakes. Lardner knew how great this book was and wanted to help his friend F. Scott. His reporter eye caught a number of errors about the levels in Penn Station, the elevated train in Queens, the "tides" in Lake Superior and the railroads that ran out of the La Salle Street station in Chicago.

In the mid-70s I was living for a time in Rockville, Maryland, in a house very close to Saint Mary's Catholic Church and cemetery. At the time Fitzgerald's daughter Scottie (who lived in nearby Georgetown) had managed to have Fitzgerald's remains moved to the family plot in this cemetery so I walked over and searched the small graveyard until I found his grave. Scottie Fitzgerald had Inscribed on his tombstone the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". It is still there today if you want to make the trip to Rockville.

And here we are in 2008, with young immigrants from China, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica trying to come to terms with their future in America by reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not a bad way for a book to be remembered. You might be tempted to call The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel. I would.

Authors! Authors! Books About the Peace Corps Experience

[Jane Albritton (India 1967-69) emailed me and asked if I would help to get the word out about her book project and I am happy to do so, anything to help RPCV writers get published and tell their stories. So, here are the details on her book(s) project.]

-

Forwarded from Jane Albritton@peacecorpsat50.org

-

In three years the Peace Corps will be 50 years old. A group of current and former volunteers have organized Peace Corps at 50 to honor that event (www.peacecorpsat50.org) in writing. We are now actively seeking non-fiction stories to include in a four-book 50th anniversary project.

The four volumes—Africa and the Middle East; After the Cold War (focusing on Central Asia and Eastern Europe); Asia and the Pacific; Central America, South America and the Caribbean—will feature stories from past and present volunteers, staff and instructors.

-

Everyone who has served in the Peace Corps has a story. We tell (and re-tell) them at RPCV and family gatherings. We (selectively) include them in job interviews and when we meet new friends. But even the best told tale can vanish from memory unless it gets recorded. A lost story takes with it important details about Peace Corps and the Peace Corps experience.

-

The editors of the Peace Corps at 50 Anniversary Story Project are looking for well-told stories that reflect the entire range of experiences in the Peace Corps—whether rosy, uplifting, scary, or ethically murky. It can be about anything from negotiating a border crossing on the Balti Express to witnessing an execution to conjuring with just what you do when presented with a plate of freshly fried crickets by a smiling girl from Chad.

-

Complete information on the project, the editors, and writers' guidelines is available at http://www.peacecorpsat50.org. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2008, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's executive order and the day it all began.

-

The fact sheet is below. Please take a look at the website, and let me know if you have any questions.

Until then,

Aloha,

Jane Albritton, series editor

Project Fact Sheet

-

Project Title: Peace Corps At 50 (www.peacecorpsat50.org)

-

Purpose: To create four books of stories to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps and to maintain a website with additional stories until 2011 and beyond.

-

Scope: Nonfiction stories that reflect the full range of experience in the Peace Corps, from the hilarious to the grim. Each book will be divided into sections that focus loosely on Expectations, Peace Corps Tasks, Unexpected Shadows, and the Context of History. If the Peace Corps were a person, these stories would be her memoir.

-

Editors: Jane Albritton (India 1967-69), Series Editor, Editor for Asia and the Pacific Pat Alter (Paraguay 1970-72), Editor for Central and South American and the Caribbean Jay Chen (Kazakhstan 2005+), Editor for After the Cold War (including Central Asia and Eastern Europe) Dennis Cordell (Chad 1968-70), Editor for Africa and the Middle East (biographical information on the editors available at

www.peacecorpsat50.org)

RPCV Tom Bissell to read at Middlebury College

RPCV Tom Bissell author of The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, will read from his work on January 16 at Middlebury College in Vermont. This event, free and open to the public, will be at the Middlebury College Château Grand Salon, located on Château Road off College Street (Route 125) at 4:30 pm. The event is presented by the Middlebury College Department of English and American Literatures, Atwater Commons, and Bread Loaf Writing Conference.

Bissell traveled with his father, a former Marine captain, to revisit scenes of the older man’s Vietnam War experience. The book is a record of that journey, as well as a fresh and sharp account of Vietnam as a turning point in United States foreign relations. In the New York Review of Books, author Robert Stone called the book “fine and wise” and wrote, “It belongs with the best of Vietnam meditations. Its wisdom ought to be a guide for us in the future.”

Bissell has also written God Lives in St. Petersburg, a collection of stories, and Chasing the Sea, about his Peace Corps experience in Uzbekistan.

Tom's writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Boston Review, Men’s Journal, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He was a Bread Loaf Scholar and Fellow, a winner of the Rome Prize and a Black Mountain Fellowship, and he currently teaches at Bennington College.

For more information, contact Associate Director of the Middlebury College Fellowships in Environmental Journalism Christopher Shaw at 802-443-5567 or cshaw@middlebury.edu.

Internet Home for Writers

If you have a book published, or you are writing one, I urge you to check out www.Redroom.com. This website premiered on December 21, 2007 and is a online community for writers. So far a few dozen have signed up, including Salman Rushdie and Amy Tan.

-

The site is meant to appeal to authors, booksellers, publishers as even general readers as a kind of one-stop shop for biographical information, book reviews, blogs, video and audio content, and author appearances. It's a virtual place where writers can network and promote themselves--and in a world where publishers put most of their efforts into promoting their best selling authors (after all, publishing is a business)—Redroom.com puts writers of limited or no success on an equal footing, providing each with a Web page and blog.

-

Membership on redroom.com is free to all writers. Publishers are also being invited to have free Web pages, with Chronicle Books serving as the Web site's first test case. The founder, Ivory Madison, has collected $1.25 million in venture capital for the business and has hired a staff of 15. She expects to break even in 2008 and make $15 million in gross revenue in 2009.

-

As the Internet becomes more important to the book industry, publishing houses increasingly focus on viral marketing, creating book-related videos and individual author sites, doing outreach to bloggers and even releasing books for downloading on the Web. Thanks to Redroom.com, writers can now do this for themselves.

-

Some 10 percent of Redroom Omnimedia Corp. is owned by private investors, whose ranks include venture capitalists and investment bankers as well as publishing industry executives such as Nion McEvoy, chairman of Chronicle Books; Internet guru Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

-

Check it out and see if we can create a community of Peace Corps writers on Redroom.com.

Another Novel Where the Peace Corps Plays a Part

The plot device of a 'child left behind' is common enough in literature, most recently in Vietnam books, and now, of course, in novels where the Peace Corps plays a role. Chatter, a new novel by Perrin Ireland, [she's a former executive in the National Endowment for the Arts and with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] has as its plot 'hook' the arrival into the life of a Bostonian couple--Sarah and Michael--a young woman who claims to be man's daughter from "his time in the Peace Corps in Latin America." And then, as we say, the plot thickens as Michael plans to reunite with his daughter's mother, his long lost PCV Latin lover.

Sarah, of course, gets wind of what is taking place and sees all sorts of possible scenarios in Michael's past and his motivations. She also gets involved with another man, and mixed in with all of this plotting is the story of Sarah helping her best friend through chemotherapy sessions.

There are enough plots here for several novels. It appears Perrin Ireland is trying to get at the problems of our fragmented lives and that everyone is always, well, chattering away and missing the real emotions and how things really are in the world and with each other. The book is of our times and full of talk, radio commentary, television, and pings. Ireland knows and understand that world, coming as she does from NEA and public radio.

The Peace Corps plays a minor and handy device for Ireland to set her story in motion. The novel, however, has little to do with being a PCV, but in truth, it does. Because whatever else you say about the Peace Corps, there is always a tale to tell.

[The novel is published by Algonquin, a fine publisher.]

Venture Philanthropy for Writers

Jim Bildner is a writer who has turned to helping other writers with Literary Ventures Fund (LVF), a foundation "whose mission is to provide financial support for individual books, regardless of who is publishing them." Since May 2005 when he set up the foundation, he has helped twelve books, including RPCV Kris Holloway's (Mali 1989-91) memoir, Monique and the Mango Rains, published by Waveland Press in Long Grove, Illinois.

Bildner calls what he does, "venture philanthropy" that is a "partner-in-risk" with its clients, i.e., publishers and writers, and LVF acts like both an investor and consultant. As investor, the LVF puts capital into books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in the hope of earning money. The money can be used by the publisher to print more books or by the author to help defray the costs of spending more time writing.

As a consultant, LVF offers assistance with public relations and marketing to help authors, publishers, and booksellers get more books in front of as many readers as possible.

[It is a small foundation with a major staff and board of directors, including Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, who happens to be a good friend of mine.]

When Kris Holloway heard a presentation about LVF in 2006 she wrote a proposal to them and they accepted her book. They helped market it by reaching out to independent booksellers and setting up a regional tour for Kris. They also developed a media kit and reading group guide that could be downloaded from the foundation's website. So far, Monique and the Mango Rains has sold over 15,000 copies which is a tremendous sale for this type of book.

If you are interested, and have a book that you think can be helped by LVF, check out their site at www.literaryventuresfund.org. And you can also read about LVF in the Jan/Feb 2008 Poets & Writers.