O-Neaaers Returned Peact• Corps Voluntet•Rs Write Ahout Their World
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
WRirnER~. D . J $ o-neaaers Returned Peact• Corps Voluntet•rs write ahout their world May 1994 Volume 6, Number 3 Recent books by Peace Corps writers BIG DREAMS MANAGING EMERGENCY INTO THE HEART OF CALIFORNIA SITUATIONS IN LAW FIRMS by Bill Barich (Nigeria 1964-66)) MINIMIZING THE DAMAGE Pantheon, $24.00 by Nina Wendt (Malaysia 1973-76) and 539 pages L. J. Sklenar Inside ... May, 1994 Association of Legal Administrators Talking with Dick $75.00 (members), $100.00 (nonmembers) BUDDHA'S UTILE INSTRUCTION Lipez ........................ 2 Kendall Hunt Publishing Company BOOK P.O. Box 1840 Reviews ............... 4-6 by Jack Kornfield (Thailand 1967-69) Dubuque, IA 52004 Bantam Paperback, $9.95 Readers write ........... 7 210pages 192 pages February, 1994 Heads up! ................ 8 May,1994 rl SALVAGING A LAND OF PLENTY Journals of Peace ... 10 MASTERS OF ILLUSION GARBAGE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM (Novel) Famous 1si Lines ... 1·1 by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith "'~ ... (Nigeria 1962-64) Poem ...... ,:i: ........ ::12 (Cameroon 1965-67) _, William Morrow, $22.00 Warner Books, $21.95 288 pages Announcements ..... 13 210 pages ' . April, 1994 Cable Traffic May,1994 ................ everywhere TAT-TAP BOB VILA'S GUIDE TO HISTORICAL (A children's picture book about Haiti) HOMES OF THE MIDWEST AND by Kilren Lynn Williams (Malawi 1980-83) GREAT PLAINS lllustrated by Catherine Stock BOB VILA'S GUIDE TO HISTORICAL Clarion Books, $14.95 HOMES OF THE WEST 34pages by Bob Vila (Panama 1969- 70) March, 1994 Quill, $15.00 THE MEANING OF INTERNATIONAL 320pages EXPERIENCE FOR SCHOOLS May,1994 by Angene Hopkins Wilson (Liberia 1962-64) Greenwood Press, $47.95 184 pages July, 1993 Talking with Richard Lipez Dick Lipez is one of the many Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Ethiopia and then went on to publish books. Among the Ethiopian RPCVs writers are Maria Thomas, Kathleen Coskran, Mark Dintinfass and John Coyne. Lipez was an Ethiopia I Volunteer teacher, then returned to worked in Peace Corps/Washington before becoming a full-time writer in the late Sixties. For several years he wrote a humor column for The Nation and published newspaper and magazine articles. In the mid-eighties he returned to Ethiopia and wrote about the war in Eritrea from the Eritrean front. His first novel, GRAND SCAM, was published in 1970. Since then he has written a series of mysteries featuring Don Strachey, a gay detective, under the pseud- onym of Richard Stevenson. Most of the books in the series have been set in upstate New York, close to where Dick lives in western Massachusetts. You have published four novels about a gay detective. Why mystery novels? Why a gay detective? I was the snootiest of English majors and didn't read a mystery until I was 35. Then a friend made me try one -I think it was a Ross MacDonald -and I discovered myster- ies could be literate, socially astute, funny. I started writing them for profit and fun, and because the conventions you can fall back on make them easier to write than non-genre fiction. I marvel at writers who invent characters and make up good stories without props. It must be like flying. The detective's being gay had to do with my own snails-pace coming out. I shoved Don Strachey out first, then anxiously followed. It was my contribution to gay readers too. Gay characters in mysteries had always been psychotic-fop killers, suicidal wretches or contemptible eccentrics. That was only a tiny part of real life and therefore a lie. I wanted to help tell the truth for and about gay people and do it entertainingly. I used the pseudonym Stevenson - my middle name- because when the first Strachey came out in 1981 I had kids in elementary school and didn't want them to be told, "Hey, your pop's a sodomite." Not that that necessarily would have happened. I showed the first book in the series, DEATH TRICK, to an old-time newspaper guy I knew, and he said, "Lipez, you're smart to use a pseudonym on this. Otherwise people might think you were queer." You were one of the first returned Peace Corps Volunteers hired in Washington, and hired by Charlie Peters in the old Evaluation Division. What was that like? It was terrifying at the time. I barely knew what I was doing and wish I could go back now and do it right. Writer-reporters- some old pros, some young ex-Volunteers- made lengthy visits to the field, hung around asking questions of the Volunteers and their co-workers, then wrote book-length critical reports of the programs. The requirements were clear thinking and good writing. The aim was to make officials want to read the evaluation reports, and they were read. It was provocative and useful, 2 RPCV Writers & Readers and every government agency should be doing it now, including the Peace Corps. The Evaluation set-up was arrogant, of course, but no more arrogant than the whole idea of the Peace Corps. I remember stepping off a plane on a 1965 evaluation trip and think- ing, "Hmm, what can I come up with to fix India?" Besides your novels, how else do you make your living as a writer? It's hardly a living- I'm back in the economy of 1971, while the country has inconsid- erately moved on. I write editorials part-time for the Berkshire Eagle, mystery reviews for the Washington Post and New York Newsday, and I do free-lance book editing. The editorial-writing pay is crummy, but the job is stimulating and I can help bring some internationalist perspective to a small-city paper. Pittsfield, Massachusetts readers got harangued for years on the virtues of the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front and just barely escaped a tirade on the devaluation of the CFA franc caused by France's termina- tion last year of its policy of subsidizing the Francophone Africa currency. I realized, just in time, that was going too far. My last book, THIRD MAN Our, is under option by a filmmaker who wants badly to do it. I wish him godspeed. When I am old, I hope Congress will declare a Peace Corps veterans bonus. If you were writing the Great Peace Corps Novel, what would be the subject matter? There won't be a Peace Corps Big One about the Peace Corps Land and the Peace Corps Sea and the Peace Corps Sky, because there's no need. It's already written, in the collective and individual work of all the Peace Corps writers whose books have been described in this publication over the past five years. It has to be that way: the Peace Corps isn't like the Napoleonic wars or the old-order-receding. It is, above all else, personal, and the Great Peace Corps Novel is in the deeply personal novels and stories of Maria Thomas, Richard Wiley, Bob Shacochis, Kathleen Coskran, etc. If I could, I would do it too. What is the best Peace Corps book that you've read? It's too hard to pick one. I love Moritz Thomsen's books because he lets fly with the cross-cultural total-immersion dementia most of us were too Presbyterian to experience, let alone turn into literature. I like THE VIL.L.AGE OF WAITING a lot too- George Packer is no slouch in the belles-lettres nervous-breakdown department. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith is best at catching the humor that kept a lot of us sane. Mike Tidwell's THE PoNDS OF KALAMBAYI is the most canny and affective book about doing a Peace Corps job as well as anybody can. Geraldine Kennedy's recent HARMAITAN, about her trip across the Sahara, is very fine in the way it captures the innocence and chutzpah of the Peace Corps in Africa in the early Sixties. I know there are other good Peace Corps books that I haven't read yet. What's your next book about? It's another Don Strachey mystery, about a psychotherapy group whose leader is helping "cure" the men in the group of their homosexuality. This type of thing still goes on. There's lots of potential in it for intrigue and mayhem and, of course, my settling a few scores in a harmless and diverting way. May 1994 3 CABLE Reviews TRAFFIC ..,. AdWeek selected ALMA MATER a man: nothing human is alien to me" - as one of February's Kluge sets up housekeeping in a freshman "Best Spots" People A College Homecoming all-male dorm. The roiling life there Magazine's advertise- ment that featured by P. F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) inspires him in his quest to uncover the RON ARIAS {Peru Addison-Wesley, 252 pp. real Kenyon. 1963-64). The ad $22 .95 Kenyon was founded in 1825 by Episcopal showed Ron display- Bishop Philander Chase, who was ousted ing what he takes Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senega/1978-79) with him on assign - shortly thereafter by disgruntled faculty ment overseas. and trustees. Illustrious alumni of Chase's "Conjugate it now: I am good, you are ..,. It's a • review in "star of the west" include Rutherford B. good, we are good," P. F. Kluge comments the March 26th issue Hayes, Paul Newman and Jonathan of Publishers Weekly to himself in good-hearted mockery of the Winters. In the 1940s and 50s, fledgling, for MARY-ANN ingratiating speeches delivered by the but later famous, writers such as Robert TIRONE SMITH's President, the Provost and various deans to Lowell, James Wright and E.