Extras #69

Greetings!

WRITERS SPEAK

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” - Arthur Miller

For five decades, I’ve put off writing about the year after college that I spent in French West Africa teaching English in a village school as a Peace Corps volunteer.

The “year” was always the sticking point. 

“I thought the Peace Corps was two years,” people would say. 

They were right. I quit after 11 of the loneliest months of my entire life as a “Yovo,” or “peeled banana,” in a place where voodoo reigned, malaria triumphed and the closest American—an emotional lifeline— was 200 miles away.

That I wasn’t a Peace Corps poster boy has been a point of shame ever since, but I’ve reached the point in my life where I need to come to grips with that experience and how it shaped me. I can’t put it off any longer. That’s why Arthur Miller’s quote speaks so deeply to me. 

Writers face embarrassment every time they publish, the heartache of rejection, the sting of criticism. That’s why it has to be an act of courage to write.

I don’t know if I have the guts, but when I am through with my latest writing projects, I am going to try to write the story of that painful year and put it in the social context of the times—the War in Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s disdain for John F. Kennedy’s dream of young Americans helping others around the world, the breakup of the Beatles, etc., etc, etc.

What I have so far, apart from a 300-page journal I kept in Africa and a Swiss Cheese memory bank, is a very short prologue that I’ll share with you.