Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone
Betsy Small’s Before Before is a deeply personal and historically rich account of Sierra Leone, blending memoir and ethnography with emotional resonance. She draws from her Peace Corps service in the mid-1980s and a return visit in 2013 with her daughter to create a memoir that is more than a recollection—it is a meditation on cultural exchange, colonial legacy, and the fragile threads of memory that bind us across time and geography. Set in Tokpombu, a remote rainforest village in Sierra Leone’s diamond district, Small’s story begins with her assignment as an agricultural Volunteer tasked with improving rice yields despite...
Endless Horizons
Paul Neville’s memoir of backpacking around Southeast Asia and South America more than fulfills the promise in his subtitle: A Global Backpacker’s Quest for Adventure, Connection, and Discovery. Readers will find this self-published effort a thoroughly professional product. Expect to enjoy an assiduously edited, excellently laid out, and beautifully written book. After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, Neville’s “festering travel bug”—a condition nearly universal among returned Volunteers—launches him into a year of vagabonding on a shoestring budget. Intermingled with vivid travelogue, he tries to explain why. There is novelty, of course. Bangkok, his first stop, is...
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
I have been an admirer of Peter Hessler’s work since reading his first book, River Town, about his Peace Corps service at a Chinese university in the 1990s. I was particularly drawn to that book because of my own Peace Corps work in a Korean university and professional ties to China. Hessler wrote eloquently about his Peace Corps experience in a way that I think any returned Volunteer could relate to. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler’s latest book about China, is just as interesting and satisfying as the three other books about the country he wrote as a journalist...
When a Picture Sells a Thousand Words
From an early age, many of us are told not to judge a book by its cover, yet we intuitively know that first impressions matter—maybe more than they should. While the power of a book lies in its storytelling, its narrative, its words, very often the thing that determines whether those words are plucked from the shelf of a local bookstore is a book’s cover. Something will always be lost in translation when distilling a 70,000-word narrative into a single page, but when a cover lands “just right,” the result can have an outsized impact. So what story is the...
Letter to a First-Time Peace Corps Writer
No matter who you are, sitting down to a blank page to try and tell the story of your life can be daunting. But I’m here to reassure you that, as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, you have a great story to tell. The key question is where to start. Jacques Barzun, an accomplished writer and historian who taught at Columbia University, wrote that to become a writer you have to convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble—on paper, not eternal bronze—so let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. Just put it down, then...
A Life Lived in Books
Dan Pelzer started recording every book he read in 1962, when he arrived in Dharan, Nepal, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and began a ritual of reading through the paperbacks in his Peace Corps book locker by the bright light of a Petromax kerosene pump lantern. Thus a lifelong passion for literature was sparked, which, with the help of Dan’s daughter Marci, has gone on to inspire untold numbers of people since his death in 2025 at the age of 92. After he passed away on July 1, Marci posted her father’s meticulously handwritten record of the 3,599 books he...
Pitch Perfect
These days, there are more pathways to publication than ever before: do-it-yourself, web publishing, print on demand, vanity presses, hybrid publishers, and indie presses, to name a few. But if you dream of seeing your book on the shelves of airport bookstores or featured on an endcap at Barnes & Noble, you’ll want to shoot for a deal with one of the “Big Five” publishers—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster—each of which has a multitude of genre-specific imprints. Breaking into traditional publishing can be daunting. Most Big Five publishers will not accept unsolicited manuscripts,...
Bookstores Without Borders
Imagine you are living in the capital city of Guatemala. You need an escape, a place to find peace in your daily routine. Finding yourself in Cayalá, the outdoor shopping mall in Zona 16 of the city, you see a sign that reads “Kita Penas,” or “Forget Your Worries.” Prepared to do just that, you step inside. Finding yourself surrounded by paintings of barriletes—famous Guatemalan kites—the colors vibrate, reminding you of what it means to be Guatemalteco. Next, you notice all the books. Each title holds the key to a different magical realm or a new idea to get lost...
Mapping a Life
A Life Unimagined: The Rewards of Mission-Driven Service in the Peace Corps and Beyond By Aaron S. Williams International Division, University of Wisconsin-Madison Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Aaron S. Williams grew up in a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s. When he began studying geography at Chicago Teachers College, it was because the subject would offer him good career opportunities in the public schools. But, as he notes early in the memoir A Life Unimagined, “studying the geography of distant places around the world…the seeds once planted by my father of distant travels began to take root.” That’s not to...
Travels and Ghosts: The 2022 Peace Corps Writers Awards
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...