Literary Legacy 

Writing the Peace Corps story, from journals to bestseller lists

For as long as Peace Corps Volunteers have been sent to the remote corners of the world, they have brought back journals that capture day-to-day life in their communities, with all its ups and downs. Years and even decades later, these records give Returned Peace Corps Volunteers a way for them, and maybe a few loved ones, to relive the stories and contemplate the lessons learned from their service. But some of these journals go on to have a much larger reach as they are transformed into compelling memoirs, fiction, and other stories published professionally and even climbing to the top of bestseller lists. 

 “Back in 1996, it was pretty unusual to bring a laptop to a job like that—but I wanted to take notes,” said Peter Hessler (China 1996–98), the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. “Looking back now, my book would not have happened without those notes, because I couldn’t have gotten to that level of detail otherwise. But even if I didn’t write it, I always knew those notes were going to be interesting, because I wanted to remember the experience.” 

The importance of these journal entries isn’t just about the way they capture details. Mike Tidwell (Zaire/DRC 1985–87) said that rereading his journals while writing his Peace Corps memoir, The Ponds of Kalambayi, sparked new ways of thinking about his service.  

“The journals were important as a record, but not necessarily as a guide,” Tidwell said. “Initially, I went to my journals to organize this story, but I quickly realized that there were pages that would not have a role in the book. At the same time, though, there would be one sentence in my journal that would turn out to be a whole chapter in the book.” 

Even Volunteers who didn’t have a journaling habit can find similar source material in their correspondence with friends and family back home. George Packer (Togo 1982–83), now a journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic, turned to the letters he wrote to friends and family while writing his memoir, The Village of Waiting. 

“In writing those letters, I wanted my family and my friends to see what life was like in my community,” Packer said. “As a writer, you need the reader to see what you saw. So I used those letters to remember events, landscapes, faces, and voices. In other words, you almost had to be a journalist as a Volunteer in order to have the material needed to write a memoir, because the story in your head is best conveyed by showing what’s around you.” 

Bringing Style to the Story 

While they may share some underlying themes and similar experiences, not all Peace Corps stories are the same, and writers have leveraged a variety of literary devices and writing styles to immerse their readers within their particular story.  

For Hessler, whose book earned a place on the New York Times Notable Book List and won the Kiriyama Prize (for books that encourage greater understanding of and among South Asian and Pacific Rim nations), incorporating moments of humor from awkward cross-cultural exchanges was a way to bring the experience of cultural integration to life. 

“I wanted the reader to experience this learning process with me, from learning to speak and teach in Chinese to making innocent cross-cultural mistakes that turned out to be quite funny,” Hessler said. “Readers were able to identify with the narrator because they showed up as I did. That helped readers connect to the story and care about its characters.” 

Meanwhile, John Perkins (Ecuador 1968–71) wrote his New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and his Peace Corps memoir Touching the Jaguar with an emphasis on dialogue, a choice that was directly inspired by his experience serving in Ecuador. 

“The secret is in the storytelling,” Perkins said. “I lived in an Indigenous community in the Amazon that primarily told stories through an oral tradition, so I wrote with dialogue that let the characters take over with what they were saying and what they were feeling.” 

Vivid imagery is another powerful tool Peace Corps writers often use to place readers within the story, at their site or moving around their host country, with its distinctive sights and smells—things that most people will be reading about for the first time. This was the approach Tidwell took in The Ponds of Kalambayi. 

“The secret is in the storytelling…I lived in an Indigenous community in the Amazon that primarily told stories through an oral tradition, so I wrote with dialogue that let the characters take over with what they were saying and what they were feeling.” —Mike Tidwell

“When I’m writing, I want the writing to match what I see in my head: the village mom, the cranky chief, the beautiful children,” said Tidwell. “It’s important for the reader to vividly see what is happening, because the Peace Corps experience is fertile ground for long-length narratives. It stretches your sense of human endurance—from human achievement to human frailty—all within the chaos of the human condition. It’s the type of story that offers reassurance that Peace Corps is a worthwhile thing to do, and a worthwhile story to read about.” 

Other books, like the 1969 classic Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle by Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador, 1965–67) use humor to highlight the contradictions of overseas service. 

Service as Adventure 

While the Peace Corps experience is unique to each Volunteer and host community, its underlying themes of travel, discovery, and adventure have mainstream appeal. It’s what makes Peace Corps memoirs compelling not only for Volunteers and RPCVs, but also for the general public. Perhaps no other author embodies this spirit more than Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963–65), whose dozens of travel and adventure titles have mesmerized readers for decades. 

“People are attracted to memoirs because they want to experience a different world, and Peace Corps is a different world than what most people have experienced,” said Evelyn Kohl LaTorre (Peru 1964–66), who has written two memoirs inspired by her service: Between Inca Walls and Love in Another Language. “During Peace Corps you not only learn about other cultures, but you also learn about yourself and your own culture.”

“During Peace Corps you not only learn about other cultures, but you also learn about yourself and your own culture.”
—Evelyn Kohl Latorre

Exposure to other cultures and perspectives often compels RPCVs to think differently about the everyday aspects of life back home. And after a Volunteer’s service is complete, writing a memoir presents an opportunity to share these new perspectives in ways a mainstream reader can also relate to. 

“The Village of Waiting was organized chronologically, but each chapter explored a different theme of my time in the village,” said Packer. “One chapter was about education, another was about women and their role in the community, another was about health. The purpose of the memoir wasn’t just to record the experience, but to use it to explore each theme on a deeper level. That approach became a guidepost for me on how to use nonfiction writing to illuminate something bigger.”

That’s also why Peace Corps memoirs don’t have to be confined to stories about Peace Corps service itself. This was the case for Hessler’s River Town, which is set within the context of his service in China, but is really about the broader joys and challenges of cross-cultural exchange.  

Coincidentally, Hessler said, serving in Peace Corps also made him a better writer.  

“I referred to Peace Corps in the book because the program had an interesting history in China, but the story was really about living in this foreign place, learning to speak the language and understanding the people better,” Hessler said. “I matured a lot through that challenge of teaching in a place like that and making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and being humbled repeatedly. The experience was key to my development as a writer.” 

Inspiring the Next Generation of Peace Corps Writers 

More than 240,000 Americans have served in Peace Corps since its inception in 1961, so its literary tradition has had time to run a few cycles, with earlier Volunteers paving the way for subsequent generations of writers.  

Perhaps one of the best-known Peace Corps memoirs—and one that directly influenced Mike Tidwell’s writing—was Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, by the late Mortiz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965–68).  

“I was influenced by Moritz and his style of writing about poverty,” said Tidwell. “I learned from Moritz that you have to be brutally honest: Write about your weaknesses, your frailties, your fears. That extends to broader concepts like the contradictions of U.S. policy, including the flaws and strengths of the Peace Corps. If you’re honest about those things, you’ll completely disarm your audience, you’ll earn their trust, and it’ll become a better story.” Thomsen admired Tidwell’s writing as well: He wrote a blurb praising Tidwell’s memoir, The Ponds of Kalambayi, shortly before his death in 1991. 

No matter what Volunteers choose to write down, traveling outside of one’s comfort zone to spend two years in a foreign place comes with challenges and successes, satisfactions and frustrations. Hessler found value in that raw material, and every Peace Corps Volunteer has a similar well to draw on. 

“Peace Corps stories are complicated,” Hessler said. “The level of honesty in my journals was high, in the sense that I wrote about my own mistakes and frustrations. But Peace Corps stories are suitable for books because you can’t get to that level of detail in a podcast or a film. It requires a book to tell that story.”  

Scott King is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Grenada 2017–19), and the Founder and Executive Director of Regia Multimedia Services.