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Steven Saum posted an articleTaking Stock of two decades of work by Tom Bissell — 2022 Peace Corps Writer of the Year see more
Taking Stock of two decades of work by Tom Bissell. In 2022, Peace Corps Writers recognized him as the Writer of the Year.
By Steven Boyd Saum
Tom Bissell photo courtesy Penguin Random House
It was at the Downtown Bookfest in Los Angeles that I met Tom Bissell half a dozen years ago. Along with celebrating “Literary LA: Places, Spaces, and Faces” and the independent book scene, some of us read tributes to writers the community had lost in the past year—poets and fictioneers, tellers of true stories and writers of screenplays. I found myself talking with Bissell about a living writer we both knew and admired, Ron Hansen—whom I had worked with on editing a magazine for a decade, and who has been a finalist for the National Book Award and is a deacon in the Catholic church. For Bissell, the timing was interesting; he had just published Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, a book tracing journeys to understand Christianity and the faith Bissell had lost at age 16. “What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” Bissell writes in the last chapter of Apostle. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine.”
Ah — but what Bissell has imagined, and what other journeys he has undertaken as a writer! Those efforts have garnered him a Guggenheim, the Rome Prize, the Anna Akhmatova Prize, honors from the Writers Guild of America, as well as previous recognition from Peace Corps Writers for best travel book for Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. In that 2003 book, his first, he sought to fathom the geography and history of the Aral Sea and the lands surrounding it — a part of the world Bissell had come to know serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan in 1996.
More on that in a moment. First, a quick synopsis of Bissell’s literary ascent. Born in 1974 and raised in Escanaba, Michigan, he is a writer who once upon a time hardly seemed destined to finish high school. His father was a Vietnam vet who had served in the Marines with Philip Caputo, who went on to pen a landmark memoir of the war and many books since. Young Tom got encouragement and advice from Caputo as well as writer Jim Harrison. Bissell became the would-be writer who headed for community college and, with coaxing from a professor there, wound up at the Bennington Summer Writers Workshop and worked with writer Bob Shacochis. Bissell followed that up by becoming the would-be writer who struck out with every application to MFA programs after finishing college at Michigan State. Having had one of his classes visited by a woman who had been in the Peace Corps, Bissell wrote Shacochis — who had served in the Peace Corps in the Eastern Caribbean 1975–76 — asking if he, too, should join. Shacochis sent back a postcard with a one-word answer: “Yes.”
Off to Uzbekistan Bissell went, a few years after that country achieved independence. But Bissell left Peace Corps service early, after suffering physical ailments and grappling with severe depression. Next failure: being turned down for a job at the local paper mill. But he gained a foothold in the literary world through an internship at Harper’s.
“My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another,” Tom Bissell once told an interviewer. Photo courtesy Penguin/Random House
A few milestones on the literary journey since: true stories and fiction in multiple best-of-the-year collections, screenplays and more than a dozen video game scripts, and books of imagination and empathy. Among those books, of which there are ten or so to date: The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007), in which father and son travel together to Vietnam. There are Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010) and Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (2012) — which includes a marvelous essay I’ve shared with aspiring writers, “Escanaba’s Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.” And there is the hilarious memoir he co-wrote with actor Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life inside ‘The Room’, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, which appeared in 2013 and was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film starring James Franco. Julia Loktey and Werner Herzog have also made Bissell’s work into films.
Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt! And they do.
Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, “Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt!” And they do.
As for what brings Bissell writer-of-the-year accolades from Peace Corps Writers: Recognition for his most recent collection of stories, Creative Types (2021), an exploration in fiction in which those peripheral creative types don’t tend to come off looking so good. To wit: an assistant to James Franco (“The Hack”); a producer of reality TV; a flailing travel writer; a broken-down writer having a fling in Estonia (“Love Story, with Cocaine”); and a pair of newish parents in LaLa Land who try to liven up their marriage by hiring a sex worker for a ménage à trois.
Bissell’s work for the screen has been on display of late, too: For Apple TV+ he co-created the television series The Mosquito Coast, which debuted in 2021 and is based on the renowned book by writer Paul Theroux, who served as a Volunteer in Malawi 1963–65.
Writer's work: Tom Bissell co-created “The Mosquito Coast” for television, co-wrote the video game “Uncharted 4: A Thief's End,” and has been tapped to work on “Star Wars: Andor.”
So what’s next for Bissell? Perhaps it’s helpful to keep in mind what he confided to Publishers Weekly a while back: “My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another.” So don’t look for another story collection right away. Perhaps look for him in a galaxy far, far away: He’s been tapped to join the writers for the next season of the series Star Wars: Andor, which streams on Disney+. As showrunner Tony Gilroy put it, “Tom Bissell is a really cool and really, really interesting, versatile, really good writer.” No argument here. Also in Bissell’s favor, for this gig: “A very, very, very big Star Wars fan.”
This essay appears in the Winter 2023 edition of WorldView Magazine.
In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. Read about the rest of the writers recognized with 2022 Peace Corps Writers awards here.
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Steven Saum posted an articleHonoring works of fiction, nonfiction, and more from the Peace Corps community see more
The people’s writer, love and marriage spats in Kazakhstan, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, a C-section by flashlight in Paraguay, and an epic journey by bicycle
We make sense of the world and our interwoven lives through stories. Some of these find form years later as books — and they’ve launched more than a few literary careers. In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. In 2022 they recognized the following writers and works with Peace Corps Writers awards.
The Writer of the Year Award recognizes the work of Tom Bissell. Read an essay on him by Steven Boyd Saum here.
Paul Cowan Award for Best Work of Nonfiction
Michael Gold: The People’s Writer
Patrick Chura
SUNY Press
Michael Gold earned recognition as the People's Writer — then disappeared from the canon. Photo via Wikicommons.
In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” This biography brings to light, as Michael Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America—a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.
In addition to a mastery of research, synthesis, analysis, compassion, and fluid prose in vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America”—one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community. An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and suffered as a result of their beliefs and actions.
Chura himself served as a Volunteer in Lithuania 1992–94 and is a professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural studies.
—Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65)
Read Marnie Mueller’s full review in the previous edition of WorldView.
Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir
Love and Latrines in the Land of Spiderweb Lace
A Peace Corps Memoir
Mary Lou Shefsky
Blurb
Mary Lou Shefsky served as a health education Volunteer in Paraguay 1974–76. Among the experiences she writes of: assisting as a doctor in a rural health center performed an emergency C-section, using only local anesthetic. “My job would be to hold the flashlight on this dark, rainy morning,” she writes, “because the town’s generator only operated a few hours each evening.” Paraguay was a dictatorship at the time; Shefsky adapted to life under those political circumstances. She worked on a sanitation project and appeared with fellow Volunteer (and future husband) Stephen and a group of schoolchildren on national television to sing “The Hookworm Song.”
Shefsky went on to earn a master’s in public health from Yale and spent decades working in community health, farm worker housing development, and teaching. She and Stephen have returned to Paraguay multiple times over the decades.
Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award
I Miss the Rain in Africa
Peace Corps as a Third Act
Nancy Daniel Wesson
Modern History Press
“When the rain arrives, it is mythic,” writes Nancy Wesson of her time in Gulu, northern Uganda 2011–13. “No polite, spitting rain this. It is glorious, torrential, and loud in its own right, but rains here don’t usually come alone. Soul-rattling thunder accompanies lightning strikes that kill hundreds every year — entire schoolrooms of children at once. Lake Victoria, near Entebbe, boasts the highest number of lightning strikes in the world according to Google Maps.”
Wesson grew up in Louisiana and left a successful consulting business to serve as a Volunteer at age 64, when many would be preparing to head into retirement. This memoir traces her experiences as a Volunteer and returning to the U.S. — and completing a book very different from the one she set out to write. The book earned a Silver Nautilus Award for its writing about world cultures’ growth and development.
Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Third Goal Effort
Lucky
An African Student, An American Dream, and a Long Bike Ride
Brooke Marshall
Atramental Publishing
“In the summer of 2018, I rode a bike named Lucky from Raleigh to Seattle,” Brooke Marshall writes. “I covered 5,085 miles in a little over three months, solo.” It was an epic journey in its own right—and one with a purpose.
While serving as a Volunteer in Malawi 2013–15, Marshall “met a lot of talented students who wanted to go to college, but couldn’t afford it.” She helped some apply for study at universities abroad; two benefited from a foundation scholarship program. The next year, she helped students apply to some 25 schools, building contacts with admissions counselors at institutions that potentially offered full scholarships for international students. She also successfully petitioned Educational Testing Service, which administers the Test of English as a Foreign Language, to offer a non-computer-based version of the test, to make the test accessible — and fairer — to students who didn’t have regular access to required tech.
All that is prelude to the journey at the heart of Lucky. After Marshall returned to the U.S., she created the Represent Foundation and embarked on that bike tour, during which she met with admissions counselors at 18 universities. She told them about the students in the village where she taught and of their potential. She raised funds to help students pursue their education in Malawi — where the funding goes farther, and educational opportunities more closely within reach.
Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Young Adult Fiction
The Adventures of Mayana
Falling Off the Edge of the Earth
David Perry
Independently Published
David Perry (Belize 1985–87) tells the story of a 17-year Belizean girl named Mayana who finds herself on an adventure in a fantasyland of magic, monsters, and intrigue. She crosses into an alternate reality where the laws of nature and science are very different from what she learned. While she attempts to find her way back to Belize, she befriends a young man who speaks only in parables. He helps Mayana use her newfound magic powers to fight monsters and witches and to attempt to find her
way home.This is Perry’s first novel. For more than 30 years he has taught and served as an educational administrator. He has also returned to Belize regularly over the years with his wife, Anaceli, who calls that country home.
Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Short Story Collection
A Husband and Wife Are One Satan
Stories
Jeff Fearnside
Orison Books
This slim collection by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04) comprises five stories set in Kazakhstan. Each story is a gem and focuses on a unique aspect of Kazakh life. “Accomplices to a Tradition” illuminates the practice of bride stealing; a woman is, essentially, kidnapped by a man and then, if accepted by his family, must marry him. On display here: police corruption; tensions between ethnic Russians, such as the narrator of the story, and ethnic Kazakhs; and the ubiquity of the vodka bottle.
The title story delves into the lives of customers in a village café operated by Raim and Railya, an ethnic Tatar couple. There is Kolya, a Russian Christian, who is married but comes to the café with his girlfriend; Murat, a Kazakh Muslim and his Russian friend, Tikhan; a pair of teenage girls looking for husbands; and an older, widowed alcoholic. Raim and Railya discover that their business becomes more robust when they argue loudly in front of their customers, providing endless entertainment, and they each give as good as they get. (The title of the story comes from a saying that means, essentially, “It takes two to tango.”) The plot takes a darker turn when the arguments get out of hand.
Some stories touch on the changes in Kazakhstan over the years, from its contributions to the Great Patriotic War to its independence after the collapse of the USSR. Traditions and struggles persist. It is gratifying to read about them in the hands of a skillful writer like Fearnside. •
—Clifford Garstang (Korea 1976–77)
Maria Thomas Award for Best Book of Fiction
A Thousand Points of Light
Marc-Vincent Jackson
Page Publishing
After three decades of teaching languages in the U.S. and elsewhere, Marc-Vincent Jackson (Senegal 1986–89) has published his debut novel, a tale of interwoven lives in Senegal in the 1980s. The story centers on Fatou, an outcast Senegalese woman. “To start at the beginning,” says one narrator, “that is not such a long time ago; stories and Africa have the same age. Since we all go so far back, history is our life; our pasts and presents are the same. I come from a long line of griots, so I know the history of the world and everyone in it. Thus, I know who I am and what I must do to live my history. I know, in this way, everyone. But because I love Fatou, it is her story I know the best.”
The novel is inspired by Jackson’s Peace Corps service during the presidency of George H.W. Bush — when the phrase “a thousand points of light” widely entered the national lexicon.
Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book
Rwanda and the Mountain Gorillas
Steve Kaffen
Independently Published
Land of a Thousand Hills — and the best tea in the world. Photo by Steve Kaffen
Landlocked Rwanda, in the Great Rift Valley, is one of Africa’s smallest and most densely populated countries, and one of its most diverse. Nicknamed “Land of a Thousand Hills,” the country is blanketed with rolling farmland. Travel writer Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994–96) notes that it is also home to Volcanoes National Park — with mountain gorillas in the higher elevations and golden monkeys down below — and Nyungwe National Park rainforest, where sources of both the Nile and Congo Rivers can be found. The book includes more than 150 original photos.
Throughout the country are memorials to the victims of the genocide in spring 1994. Offsetting the trauma is the resilience of Rwanda’s warm and outgoing population. Their desire for stability and solidarity is exemplified by umaganda, a morning of public service on the last Saturday of the month when all Rwandans engage in volunteer work for the betterment of their communities.
Marian Haley Beil Award for Best Book Reviews
D.W. Jefferson
This award goes to D.W. Jefferson for his body of work, which includes more than 30 insightful reviews for Peace Corps Worldwide. Jefferson also assists authors publishing with the Peace Corps Writers imprint. He served as a Volunteer in El Salvador 1974–76 and in Costa Rica 1976–77. He has worked as a software engineer, taught programming and database management, worked as a Spanish language translator and interpreter, and is a longtime member of the RPCVs of Wisconsin-Madison, a group known by returned Volunteers around the world for publishing the annual Peace Corps International Calendar.
See more about books in this section at peacecorpsworldwide.org.
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Communications Intern 2 posted an articleBiographer Patrick Chura also brings to light the struggles of “another America.” see more
Michael Gold: The People’s Writer
By Patrick Chura
SUNY Press
Reviewed by Marnie Mueller
In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and suffered as a result of their beliefs and actions. In this biography he brings to light, as Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America — a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.
Michael Gold was born in a tenement in 1893 as Itzok Isaac Granich (aka Irwin Granich), and he later wrote: “It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars. The sky above the airshafts was all my sky, and the voices of the tenement neighbors in the airshaft were the voices of all my world. There in my suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man.”
In order to become “Michael Gold” the author, Irwin Granich had to break with that old culture. Chura describes how it felt like suicide for Gold to separate himself from his parents and their assimilationist desires for prosperity and choose his own path, his “synthesis for life,” as an author and activist. This was his talent and his undoing. His major literary gift to the American canon was Jews without Money in 1930, an autobiographical proletarian novel about growing up in that world. It was enormously successful and translated into over a dozen languages. His only novel, it served as a model for political fiction and the touchstone and source of strength for his own critical writing and editorial influence in progressive and Marxist periodicals.
Gold’s strong views on political literature gained followers, but as time went on, the strength and some would say rigidity of his beliefs undercut his standing in that intellectual world. Chura doesn’t shrink from showing how Gold could turn against his fellow authors—even those whose work he had lauded on first encounter, like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, whom he later determined didn’t live up to his notions of true proletarian and anti-racist writing. During the McCarthy Era, they retreated to safer ground; Gold deemed them mere visitors to the life of the poor and underprivileged.
This biography brings to light, as Michael Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America — a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.
In Faulkner’s case, Gold’s aggrievement seems especially justified. In 1956, when Autherine Lucy attempted to integrate the University of Alabama, Faulkner the liberal Southerner walked back his support of Black Americans, retreating to a stance against “forced integration,” saying he would join with “that embattled white minority who are our blood and kin.” Shocked, Gold responded, “This surely is thinking with the blood … the sort of ‘thinking’ that loomed large in Nazi ideology, and has long kept the South in pauperism.”
In this stand, Gold linked racism, anti-Semitism, capitalism, and classism as the greatest of political evils. Gold’s criticism and opinion pieces also foretold of a progressive rigidity in promulgating what is correct and non-correct in proletariat storytelling, morphing into our current conundrum of demanding authenticity of class and racial credentials.
Nearer to my own life and family was the support Gold gave to the cooperative movement, which was thought of as a subversive, socialist concept in the 1930s and 1940s. My father, an economist, was a strong believer in and promulgator of co-ops as giving an economic power base for the “little guy” against the corporate state. So it was with great surprise that upon entering the Peace Corps I found myself in Puerto Rico in 1963 with a group training to work in Ecuador as specialists in co-operative movement credit unions. Gold might have been even more astonished to learn that this once-thought radical movement was being used in the fight against Communist inroads in Latin America.
My parents became an example of those progressive commitments when they decided to spend their honeymoon and first year of marriage in 1938 working in the Farm Security camp which John Steinbeck used as research for The Grapes of Wrath. They later went to work in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security Camp to try to make a horrific situation tolerable for those who had been imprisoned there. But they, along with many progressives of their generation, were punished during the McCarthy period and accused of being Communists, resulting in their loss of livelihood and vocation.
Signing up for the Peace Corps brought it home to me. I remember my father’s distress when the FBI walked from house to house in our neighborhood asking about our family, in preparation for deciding whether the Peace Corps would accept my application for service. My father feared that the attacks on him during the McCarthy witch hunts would ruin my possibility of following my dream. It’s a tribute to the Peace Corps they judged me solely on my accomplishments.
In vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America” — one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community.
In addition to a mastery of research, synthesis, analysis, compassion, and fluid prose in vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America” — one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community.
Patrick Chura himself served as a Volunteer in Lithuania 1992–94 and is a professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural studies. In introducing Gold’s family life into the narrative, Chura lets the reader see that political activists of that time — like Gold and like my parents — loved their children and tried to protect us, with as much commitment as they invested in making our country a better place for all Americans.
This review originally appeared on Peace Corps Worldwide and appears in the Spring-Summer 2022 edition of WorldView magazine.
Marnie Mueller served as a Volunteer in Ecuador 1963–65. She is the author of three novels, including The Climate of the Country, which takes place in the Tule Lake Japanese American Internment Camp in Northern California.
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