It does not include any information that appears in the yellow sidebars, information on the Current Issue page which provides links to each of the articles, or links, book covers, photos or graphics that appear on any of the pages. Nor does it include listings from “40 Years of Peace Corps Writers: The Tour,” archived copies of RPCV Writers & Readers, any bibliographic listings or "Links of Interest."

Peace Corps Writers – September 2002

Contents — click on title to jump down to read. Or just print the whole thing.

Front Page

Readings from the 40 + 1: Remembering the West Indies

Letters from — Botswana

A Volunteer's life in Romania

A Writer Writes — The Guissongui Show

To Preserve and to Learn — One Morning in September

To Preserve and to Learn — Howls from a Hungry Place, Part III: Moritz Thomsen

Talking with Barbara Kerley

Literary Type — September 2002

Recent Books by Peace Corps Writers — September 2002

Death of an RPCV writer — Remembering Tim McLaurin

Peace Corps Writers — September 2002 — Front page

Readings from the 40 + 1

A Writer Writes

“Saturday Night Live” for the vendors
The women perch behind their rice sacks, in riotitously patterned and ruffled shirts. They ask me how my house is, how my health is, how my husband and children are. The normal response to all of the above is “They’re there,” even if one is sick, widowed, and barren. But in my ventures into the local language, I’ve recently learned to tell the truth. When they ask, I shake my head and suck my teeth and say “I don’t have a husband,” or “I don’t have any kids.” These responses are “Saturday Night Live” for the women of the village. Their faces crinkle into grins, they hoot and laugh and slap each other on the back. The minor turn of phrase has been such a hit that I’ve added a few extra phrases to my repertoire. They say, “Why not, Guissongui?” calling me by my village name. And I say, “I’m not looking for one. Maybe later, kids? I don’t want them quite yet.”
      My march through the market stops every few feet to repeat this conversation with each huddle of women. It’s like I’m auditioning them for the part of Incredulous Old Lady. Each asks exactly the same questions and each attempts to eclipse the last one’s performance during the “collapse with laughter” part. Some add their own creative flair. One grabs her breasts, shakes them and says, “Why don’t you want kids? You’re ready to have them.” Another grabs my breasts. The ritual never seems to lose steam. Week after week, the women clap and pitch forward, chortling as though they’d never heard the joke before. It’s a game we play out to the fullest. They always feign surprise at my answer, letting out a shocked “Ye?” and cocking their heads before laughing. I always shrug with practiced disinterest at the whole husband idea. And they laugh.
(Incidentally, every time a male Volunteer comes to visit, all my assertions get shot down. The women wag their fingers, “Hah! You do have a husband!” as if they’ve been onto my ruse from the very beginning. I’ve gained a hundred “brothers” trying to convince the old women they are not my lovers.)

Basic Life things
Aside from vowing celibacy, I use my marketplace rounds to rehearse any other Niarafolo phrases I’ve picked up during the week. After four months in the village, I can say basic Life things regarding washing, eating, going, buying, and enough key colloquialisms to send all parties into a discussion about how I’ve mastered the language, no matter how long the conversation has been. It’s relatively easy to guess what people are saying. Nonetheless, my vocabulary is slim and my understanding of grammar nonexistent. There doesn’t seem to be one tutor who can help me regularly — I have between 2 and 200 who tell me contradictory things all the time. I’ve only recently discovered that ki mi den means “I don’t like it”— not to be confused with kuh me den, which means, “I like it.” It’s a phrase I’ve espoused — but apparently haven’t learned — from the get-go. Market women stuff little gifts into my basket every week, and I’ve been diligent about insulting them every time. When they’ve offered me a gift chicken or extra onions or a free bowl of porridge, I’ve smiled big and said, “Thank you! I don’t like it!” Somehow this blunder has morphed into a success — add it on the “Reasons to Laugh At Guissongui” list. I figure as long as I’m laughing too, they’re laughing with me, right? Either way, being fallible and laughable closes the gap. It makes me more approachable to those who still assume that, as a white woman, I must be treated differently, and less alien to those who just don’t know what to make of me at all.
     So I move past chattering women in cell phone-print sarongs and bright scarves, clasping hands, asserting my singleness, and eventually buying sugar and soap and matches and leaves to make leaf sauce. If I don’t have the correct change, they’ll just expect me to come back later and pay up. That’s what everyone else does — there’s a paperless credit system that runs like clockwork. Each woman — and there’s not one among them who knows ciphers — has a list of her debits and credits etched in her head. I, however, forget to pay routinely, and am constantly being tapped on the shoulders by sellers I’ve unintentionally swindled.
     And for everything I buy, these women in flip-flops who have rarely left the village, who save up their market earnings for months to buy a new outfit for Ramadan, fill my basket with extra handfuls. I wander home each week as the sun slips west with several things I’ve paid for plus bowls of peanuts, heaps of hot peppers, spare rolls of sweet bread, bags of millet fritters, and bunches of baby bananas, all piled into my basket by grinning women who dismiss my protests with a wave of the hand.

As the daughter of a Foreign Service officer, Sarah Erdman grew up on the fringes of the Mediterranean and Washington, DC. After, studying history at Middlebury College in Vermont, she worked as a health Volunteer for Peace Corps/Cote d'Ivoire. There she instituted an infant care program, trained village health workers, and raised funds for the construction of a maternity clinic. She is currently living in Washington, DC and completing a book of stories about her years in the village.

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat down at my office desk and turned on my computer. As the computer booted to life, I glanced up and looked out of the windows of my office on the sixth floor of the Customs House in the heart of the financial district of New York. From where I sat, I could see the corner of Tower One of the World Trade Center. I could glance across the street and see Building Seven of the World Trade Center, where New York City had its Emergency Center, and where the CIA offices were located. Since becoming Regional Manager of the New York Peace Corps Office, I always thought it was odd that our agency would be located there, at the very center of the financial world. I remember taking a sip of coffee. That moment and what I was thinking has stayed with me because it was the last moment in my life when everything was normal. And then the first of the two planes hit the Tower.
     I knew it was a plane. And I knew we had been hit. Having served in the army as a Green Beret before joining the Peace Corps, I knew something was serious wrong and we were all in trouble.
     It was 8:46 a.m. in the office and while we often have as many as twenty working out of the suite of offices, there were only two recruiters with me: Seetha Madhavan (Kyrgyz Republic 1998–00) and Doug Miller (Thailand 1990–92).
     When the plane hit — and we had no doubt that it did hit the Tower — the whole building shook and immediately scraps of metal, glass, and parts of the plane sailed down passed my windows crashing onto the street below. I glanced out of the window and watched people fleeing from the wreckage.
     “A bomb?” Doug asked, rushing to my office.
     “No,” I said. “It’s a plane. Let’s go.”
     We left the sixth floor by the stairwell and with others from the floor made it down to the glass entrance of the Customs House that opened onto the wide and beautiful plaza of the Trade Center.
     I glanced out through the wide glass doors and the floor to ceiling windows. Nothing in my military experience had prepared me for what I saw — a swath of destruction had already fallen upon the Trade Center. Still, irrationally, I kept thinking: “I’m safe. I’m safe.” But with each step, the scene became much more horrific.
     Already on the plaza I could see shapes of fallen bodies, the first victims of 9/11, chunks of metal from the plane, office furniture, showers of paperwork, and in the air, the smell of burning jet fuel.
     With everyone else, the two recruiters and I turned from the plaza and moved quickly across the bridge to the Financial Center, then out through the Winter Garden onto the open courtyard that fronted the Hudson River. Looking up, I saw the gapping hole of where the plane had smashed into Tower 2. High above this gaping hole, tragic souls were leaping from the burning tower to their death.
     But even then, even as I stood staring up at this towering inferno, I had every expectation of returning to the office that day. I turned with the others to search for a telephone to call my family, to tell those closest to me that I was okay, that I was alive, that everything was going to be okay.
     Not until the second plane hit did I begin to realize the magnitude of what was happening to our city and country. Now I stood in the midst of total chaos – rushing crowds, people desperate to get away, to find a working phone, to find each other.
     Still, I couldn’t get my family off my mind. My mother. My six year old daughter. It would take me hours before I could get in touch with them and by then they thought that I was among the ones who had perished. For my mother I was reborn on that day.

I HAVE NO CLEAR RECOLLECTION of what happened next, or in what order. What comes back to me now are bits and pieces of the day. I remember most how suddenly all New Yorkers began to work together as a family. Strangers gave each other their working cell phones to make calls, others shared bottles of water, I saw a woman in high heel standing in the middle of an intersection directing traffic, cab drivers stopping to fill their taxis with those who needed a ride.
     It took me most of the day to reach my home in Queens, having walked across the city. A cab driver stopped at one point and get me a lift for the last several miles out of lower Manhattan. It was only then, safe in my apartment that I realized what had happened. But even then I didn’t know what to do.
     I got a call from a friend who had had my job with the Peace Corps previously and he gave me the phone numbers of Peace Corps Washington and told me to call, to let them know I was okay. I did make the call, but weeks later when we talked about that day, I don’t remember him calling me, or giving me the phone numbers.

I DO REMEMBER THE NEXT DAY. On the 12th, I got a call from Chuck Baquet, then the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps. What I remember most is what he said to me that morning. He said, “Edwin, we can’t let this get to us. We can’t let them win. We need you to get your office back up and running in two weeks.”
     Sure, I told him. “Sure, Chuck, I can do that.”
     And when I hung up, I thought: “How am I going to do that?”
     Not only was I still in shock, but the whole city was. My staff was scattered over four states. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone. Our building — World Trade Center # 6, the Customs House — had been crushed when Tower 1 collapsed. Everything was lost. All our files, our computers, the phones and personal effects.
     And the city was a logistical nightmare. The trains were barely running. Utilities downtown were a mess. 15 million square feet of office space had just evaporated into a giant cloud of gray dust. And I had just told the Deputy Director that I could get the New York Regional Office up and running in two weeks.
     But the great thing about Chuck’s request was that it focused my life. It gave me direction at a time when I was preoccupied with my mortality. It reminded me, most of all, that the job we do — getting Peace Corps Volunteers into the field — was never more important than it was after September 11.
     At the time of the attack, our office had over 300 new application in our files. It would have been easy to become overwhelmed by the task of rebuilding those files, but we couldn’t do that. Those 300 Americans wanted to become Peace Corps Volunteers. We couldn’t let them down.
     And we didn’t. Through the hard work of many people in my office, and with the support of Peace Corps Headquarters, we were able to get back on our feet in what I now realize was a remarkably short time.
     I began by calling a friend who found us temporary office space in a building he owned. We moved in within days of the attack. Then against all odds, I was able to find permanent space in a building not far from where our office had been. In less than two months, the New York Office was up and running. The recruiters were making new nominations by November.
     But doing everything was its own nightmare. To get our mail, I stood on line at the post office for hours at a time, trying to find what had happened to it.
     But through it all, the support we got was tremendous. I had 55 messages on my answering machine the first night of the attack, and for weeks, I got email from people around the globe asking about us, wishing us well. Most important was the help and assistance I got from Peace Corps/Washington and all the regional offices across the country.
     Since the attack, our office has had an almost 15% increase in applications over the past year.

I NEED TO TAKE A MOMENT to thank everyone collectively for your support. Several people were absolutely vital to the success of our recovery. Bruce Dury, for one, was an absolute godsend to have working in New York at that time.
     This anniversary makes me realize how lucky I was personally, how grateful I am that no one from the Peace Corps was injured. My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones, as well as with all of those people who made tremendous sacrifices.
     The silver lining in this experience is the cooperation and support we got from so many people around the world — it mirrored that sense of community I felt in the city around 9/11. But the most valuable thing of all is the unity of purpose that we all share at this great organization — it has never felt so important. Thank you.

Prior to serving as Regional Manager, Ed Jorge spent 25 years with Spanish-language media in New York City, working in marketing and sales for two of the leading Spanish daily newspapers and for a Colombian television and radio company. He also ran the in-house advertising agency for a Latin communications group.
     Ed has an MPA from New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. He served in both the U.S. Army Reserves and the U.S. Navy.

To Preserve and to Learn

Ramón, my best friend, my partner, that jungle-wise black who was supposed to support me through the crisis of my sixties and at the end see me decently buried, had lost his nerve. He had driven me off the farm. The details were so outrageous that now, almost a year later, I still cannot bear to think about it.
      . . . Kicked off the farm, I went to live in Quito. . . . I found a small apartment with a view of a cement wall . . . I bought a bed, a table, and four plates, three more than I needed. How awful it was to be of no use to anyone, to awaken in the mornings and be unable to think of a single reason for crawling out of bed. One day out of desperation it occurred to me that finally I might make a trip.

     Thomsen’s journey takes him to Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro he is faced once again with the crushing poverty that pervades life in South America. Eating in a small restaurant, he is served a huge bowl of potato salad (“I order what I think is a tossed Italian salad” — despite some 15 years spent living in Ecuador, Thomsen still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of Spanish, and the Portuguese of Brazil is beyond his grasp). He pushes the half-eaten bowl away, and

. . . immediately a Negro who has been standing against the wall and made invisible by some large potted plants appears by the next table and with the fierce power of his concentration impales me with his look. He stares into the bowl of salad, brings one hand to his mouth, and implores me with the other hand, the palm up, open and vulnerable . . . . I offer him the salad; he takes it and sits at the next table, hunched over the food, eating rapidly. We do not look at each other again for there is something unspeakable in that desperate hunger that lies between us like an accusation.
     Walking in the street I consider with confusion that good feeling I had had at offering a hungry man my garbage.

Although it does not take place on this trip, Thomsen recounts a journey he made to Lima, Peru, years before. He sought out a church in that huge, sprawling city of eight million people that contains the mummified remains of Francisco Pizarro, the infamous Spanish conquistador, founder of Lima and conqueror of the Incas. Standing before the body, Thomsen took advantage of his opportunity to spit on the floor at the head of the glass coffin. He sees Pizarro as "the greatest capitalist the world has even known”:

…and his figure, the eyes still flashing with avarice, still strides across the continent, across the world. . . . The manipulators of technology are the new Pizarros; the directors of the multinationals are the new rulers of the world — nice men with gentle manners some of them, connoisseurs of wine, modern art, beautiful women. . . . They are the most honored men, sharing the admiration of the world with the politicians whom they have bought off and who serve them. . . . These guys may own the world, but they don’t control it: they are puppets caught up and driven ahead by the cresting wave of an incredible science that is way past their power to control: they are puppets blind to the consequences of their actions, alive only to the big chance. They are the bastards, these sober-suited Pizarros, who are going to kill us all.

The Saddest Pleasure is, like all of Thomsen’s published works, impossible to pigeonhole into any one category. What makes it such an important and powerful book is the far-ranging sweep of Thomsen’s ire as he rages against the powers that have been strangling all of South America for centuries. It’s tough going at times; dark, cynical, utterly stark in the hopelessness he sees in the future of that huge, complicated continent. It is writing that is heartbreaking in its timelessness — a book written during the early eighties and published in 1990, Saddest Pleasure is still right on the money in 2002. Ongoing drug wars; roving gangs of murderous thugs; huge tidal waves wiping out villages where most people don’t have two sucres to rub together; rioting and demonstrations over gasoline prices; hordes of refugees from neighboring Colombia; crushing debt unforgiven by developed countries or the World Bank; police corruption and brutality — things have not changed enough (for the better or worse) in Ecuador or South America to make Thomsen’s twenty-year-old writing lose its relevance:

Poor raped South America. We lie over her in a kind of post-coitus triste but beginning to feel the itch of a new engorgement. After Pizarro it was all so easy. We won’t roll away from her yet; she still has the power to enflame our lusts, and her feeble efforts to roll away from us strike us as being not quite sincere. She has not yet been raped into madness like her black African sister.

     Thomsen’s journey takes him to Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro he is faced once again with the crushing poverty that pervades life in South America. Eating in a small restaurant, he is served a huge bowl of potato salad (“I order what I think is a tossed Italian salad” — despite some 15 years spent living in Ecuador, Thomsen still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of Spanish, and the Portuguese of Brazil is beyond his grasp). He pushes the half-eaten bowl away, and

. . . immediately a Negro who has been standing against the wall and made invisible by some large potted plants appears by the next table and with the fierce power of his concentration impales me with his look. He stares into the bowl of salad, brings one hand to his mouth, and implores me with the other hand, the palm up, open and vulnerable . . . . I offer him the salad; he takes it and sits at the next table, hunched over the food, eating rapidly. We do not look at each other again for there is something unspeakable in that desperate hunger that lies between us like an accusation.
     Walking in the street I consider with confusion that good feeling I had had at offering a hungry man my garbage.

Although it does not take place on this trip, Thomsen recounts a journey he made to Lima, Peru, years before. He sought out a church in that huge, sprawling city of eight million people that contains the mummified remains of Francisco Pizarro, the infamous Spanish conquistador, founder of Lima and conqueror of the Incas. Standing before the body, Thomsen took advantage of his opportunity to spit on the floor at the head of the glass coffin. He sees Pizarro as "the greatest capitalist the world has even known”:

…and his figure, the eyes still flashing with avarice, still strides across the continent, across the world. . . . The manipulators of technology are the new Pizarros; the directors of the multinationals are the new rulers of the world — nice men with gentle manners some of them, connoisseurs of wine, modern art, beautiful women. . . . They are the most honored men, sharing the admiration of the world with the politicians whom they have bought off and who serve them. . . . These guys may own the world, but they don’t control it: they are puppets caught up and driven ahead by the cresting wave of an incredible science that is way past their power to control: they are puppets blind to the consequences of their actions, alive only to the big chance. They are the bastards, these sober-suited Pizarros, who are going to kill us all.

The Saddest Pleasure is, like all of Thomsen’s published works, impossible to pigeonhole into any one category. What makes it such an important and powerful book is the far-ranging sweep of Thomsen’s ire as he rages against the powers that have been strangling all of South America for centuries. It’s tough going at times; dark, cynical, utterly stark in the hopelessness he sees in the future of that huge, complicated continent. It is writing that is heartbreaking in its timelessness — a book written during the early eighties and published in 1990, Saddest Pleasure is still right on the money in 2002. Ongoing drug wars; roving gangs of murderous thugs; huge tidal waves wiping out villages where most people don’t have two sucres to rub together; rioting and demonstrations over gasoline prices; hordes of refugees from neighboring Colombia; crushing debt unforgiven by developed countries or the World Bank; police corruption and brutality — things have not changed enough (for the better or worse) in Ecuador or South America to make Thomsen’s twenty-year-old writing lose its relevance:

Poor raped South America. We lie over her in a kind of post-coitus triste but beginning to feel the itch of a new engorgement. After Pizarro it was all so easy. We won’t roll away from her yet; she still has the power to enflame our lusts, and her feeble efforts to roll away from us strike us as being not quite sincere. She has not yet been raped into madness like her black African sister.

Publishers and reviewers alike tended to shy away from Thomsen’s war with Charlie; at the outset it can seem that readers could not possibly be as engrossed with the father-vs.-son battles of My Two Wars as Thomsen was in writing about them. But the story of this domineering, hopelessly tortured man, and the shambles he makes of his own life and those of everyone around him, is integral to the story of Moritz Thomsen’s life. He never quite managed to put his father to rest, and never was able to forgive himself for sticking to the old man, remora-like, for no other reason than to avoid being cut completely out of his will (which almost happened anyway — the bulk of Charlie Thomsen’s estate was left to anyone who could come up with a contraceptive for cats).
     Thomsen had already been drafted into the Army for over a year when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought his relatively easy, well-ordered life to a crashing halt. For all the abuse he endured from his father, the old man was rich, and Moritz spent his days as a young man skiing, camping, mountain climbing, fly-fishing, and indulging what was evidently a healthy sexual appetite whenever the chance presented itself. Even in the Army Thomsen discovered that he could volunteer for permanent KP and be spared the rigors of barracks life in exchange for endless potato peeling and pot scrubbing. But Pearl Harbor made him want to be a hero, and he entered the Army Air Corps, precursor to the Air Force, in hopes of becoming a fighter pilot. Years later, writing in his apartment in Guayaquil, he reflected on that day:

It was only years later that I understood the menacing quality of that late afternoon. It had about it an awful sense of a slumbering portentousness that emptied the air of life and continuity. It was like a gigantic stutter, an awful stopping of time, a hiatus that promised horrific changes. In a very real sense that day in December of 1941 was the true beginning of the twentieth century. That day the Depression was officially over, the ownership of America changed hands, bankrupt American farmers, the last symbols of an agricultural America built on the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, could now desert the land for five-dollar-a-day jobs in the war factories… December seventh was the last day that the country represented an ideal for which one might with dignity offer to fight and die. Ten years later it was no longer worth fighting for. Twenty years later, when three million farmers a year were going bankrupt and the Bank of America owned most of the farmland in California and you couldn’t raise tomatoes without a $150,000 harvesting machine, it was not even a country fit to live in. Unless, of course, you enjoyed working in a factory.

Ultimately Thomsen washed out of pilot school, relegated to the post of bombardier, the man who sits in the great plexiglas bubble in the nose of a B-17 and sights in on the target miles below, then releases the payload of bombs. From his seat perched above a Norden bombsight (“It was probably John Steinbeck who had popularized the belief that bombing with the Norden, one could drop a bomb into a picklebarrel from eighteen thousand feet. Perhaps our disillusionment began when . . . our practice bombs landing in little flashes of flames a thousand feet from the center of the target, proved to us that not only could we miss a picklebarrel but the factory that made them. Plus the parking area around the picklebarrel factory and the special railroad spur that hauled off the picklebarrels and the town where ten thousand employees slaved for the war effort making picklebarrels . . . .”) Thomsen had a sweeping view of the fate of bombers around and below him — the big, lumbering planes were shot to pieces by German fighters, or blown to bits by the dreaded flak bursts from anti-aircraft guns.
     In My Two Wars, Thomsen trains that same sweeping view on everything that surrounded him during the war — a devastated, weary London; drunken, hardened bomber crew members; the doomed innocents he recalls years after their deaths in the air over Berlin, France, or the English Channel; the dead members of his own crew. He writes of D-Day, where his group bombed into the front lines of smoke as instructed, only to learn to their horror afterward that the lines of smoke had moved — the American Air Corps had inadvertently dropped bombs directly in the midst of American troops. Thomsen hints at the terrible guilt one would expect from a mistake of that magnitude, but somehow soldiers thrust into situations that cause massive amounts of death and destruction must find a way to live with such guilt, or at least block it out. Thomsen addresses his own survivor guilt:

To those of us who survived combat, who flew time after time and returned to the ordinary routines, routines that at first struck us as being miraculous — eating, sleeping, bicycling along the summer roads, drinking whisky in that absolutely exclusive group of combat airmen (pleasures that gave us less and less pleasure) — a slowly growing boredom with life began to be apparent in our conscious thoughts. We were touched with shame to be still living, to be doing the same banal things in the center of that encircling and invisible and growing pile of bodies. Why had we been unchosen? There seemed to be no way to be worthy of the dead without joining them; we were in competition with the dead who had left us, and left us filled with guilt. A passion to live. A passion to die. How could we reconcile these two emotions that kept rising in us, except in the way we did, by sinking into a kind of catatonia, an emotional hibernation that was like insanity.

     When Thomsen finally reached his quota of 27 combat missions, he waited out the remaining days of the war in Texas; after the Japanese surrender, he took a 30-day leave to visit Charlie at Wildcliffe and pick up some clothes, odds and ends, and his beat-up pickup truck. What happens here as he goes from one just-completed war to the other, the one that would haunt him until his dying day, is a final outbreak of hostilities as he finds his father barely bothering to cover up the fact that Moritz, the returning war hero, would have been of much more use to him dead than alive. Thomsen’s survival, he realized years later, was looked at by his father as little more than one more complication to spoil his “sunset years.”
     Thomsen spent the years 1945 to 1964 as a hog farmer near Chico, California, a venture that finally failed and led to his foray into the Peace Corps, and ultimately to his 28-year stay in Ecuador. Through all of his experiences, he felt a great passion for writing, and produced countless articles and essays for publication in newspapers and magazines, to some success. But his four published books were mostly a labor of his own sunset years. All but Farm on the River of Emeralds are still in print; Bad News from a Black Coast has not attracted a publisher for twelve years, but Thomsen completed it probably just months or less before his death, so there is always the possibility of a fifth volume. Admittedly, Thomsen’s style can be a bit much for some readers — some find themselves turned off by a self-pitying tone, or uninterested in Thomsen’s hatred of his father, or his intense relationship with Ramón — but any writer who tries to express his rages and defeats and frustrations in life takes that chance. The fact remains that, to many fellow writers and a small, devoted cadre of readers, Moritz Thomsen is one of the truly great, yet unrecognized, American authors of our time.

an interview by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64)

Did you have to worry about having illustrators for your books or does the publisher find someone for you?

No, it’s not a writer’s job to find an illustrator. That’s part of the editor’s job, and with good reason. They have files of portfolios and years of experience working with many different artists. I think one of the things editors like best is being able to bring their vision of the story to life, working with the illustrator of their choosing. And there are other factors that can play into this, too. For instance, Tracy Mack, my editor at Scholastic, sent The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins to Brian Selznick partly because she knew he’d do a wonderful job (and, in fact, he did such a wonderful job that he was awarded a Caldecott Honor for the book), but also because he’s well known and well respected. Often an editor will pair an unknown — like me — with someone better known — like Brian — to help a book gain some momentum.

Do you have an agent?

No, and it’s something I go back and forth on. In general, I think agents aren’t as necessary in the children’s field as they are in the adult field (though this is changing). I may get one at some point, however, because I really don’t like the business side of writing and am not very good at it. (When I was a kid, the only thing I didn’t like about Girl Scouts was selling those darn cookies . . .) Alternatively, I know writers who don’t have agents but do hire a lawyer with experience in book contracts to do their negotiating for them. So that’s another option.

How did you get your newest book published, then, without an agent?

I wrote the text for A Cool Drink of Water first, then started looking for a publisher. National Geographic did an excellent job of finding photos that captured the spirit of the text.
     I did have to modify the text a bit. For example, the line “Sipped from a thin tin cup” originally read “Sipped from a chipped tin cup.” When I wrote it, I envisioned one of those enamel-covered tin cups (the kind folks take camping in America, the kind I saw all over the place when I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal — and which always seemed to have some of the enamel chipped off). National Geographic found a wonderful picture of an old man sipping from a tin cup, but it wasn’t chipped. So that line needed to be changed.
     I also ended up doing quite a bit of work when it was time to write the captions for the photos. (At the end of the book, there is a map showing where the photos were taken and a caption for each photo.) Jennifer Emmett, my National Geographic editor, sent me boxes of back issues of the magazine — I had little stacks all over my office floor — which I read through looking for the best tidbit for each caption. So all that was written after the book sold.
     When you’re first starting out in the children’s field, it’s very common to write a book and then look for a publisher. Now that I have more experience, however, this has changed a bit. For instance, my upcoming book with Scholastic Press (about Walt Whitman in the Civil War) was sold after I submitted a two-page proposal. I had already researched enough to know the broad outline of the story, but had a lot of work left to do before I even started writing. However, my editor there liked the idea so much that she offered me a contract. So I wrote the book knowing it already had a home. And my next book with National Geographic (about parents and children around the world) was actually their idea. They approached me with it and then I wrote the text.
     It’s taken me years to get to this point, however. Now I doubt I’d begin a new project in the future without at least some enthusiastic interest from an editor — even if I didn’t have a contract.

Do you have any more practical advice for RPCVs who want to write books for children?

Well, as with any kind of writing, I think it’s important to be realistic. Some folks think children’s writing is “easier” than adult writing because the books are shorter. Personally, I don’t think it’s easier, any more than writing a really good poem is easier than writing a short story, just because there are less words in it. So anyone wanting to be a children’s writer should bring the same professionalism to it that they would to writing for adults.
     To me, this means working hard, trying to keep improving your craft, and educating yourself about the field.
     Hard work requires regular, sustained, and disciplined effort, and it takes time. Improving your craft includes revising (and then revising again), getting feedback (from a critique group, a writing class, or if you’re lucky, an editor) and then acting on that feedback. Educating yourself is twofold: getting to know the latest kids’ books (spend time in libraries and bookstores); and getting to know the field by paying attention to who is publishing what and, perhaps, joining a children’s writing organization like the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.scbwi.org). It’s probably the most established group for children’s authors, and you don’t have to be published to join.

What are you working on now?

I have several things going.
     One is another nonfiction picture book with Scholastic, coming out in 2004, about the poet Walt Whitman and his years as a volunteer in the Civil War hospitals in Washington, D.C. It’s a very moving story. Walt wasn’t trained formally as a nurse, but he had great compassion and he was very dedicated. He came to the hospitals almost daily, bringing gifts such as fruit, newspapers, paper and envelopes. He wrote letters home for men too ill to do so. He fed men too weak to eat. Mostly, however, he just sat and kept them company. Many of the patients ended up spending months and months in the hospital, often without family nearby. Considering the state of medicine in general and the strained circumstances brought on by the war, it was a true act of selflessness on Walt’s part. Though he never fought as a soldier, he risked his life through constant exposure to diseases such as typhoid fever. Years later, however, when Walt looked back, he called his Civil War years “the greatest privilege and satisfaction” of his life.
     I’m also working with National Geographic on a follow-up to A Cool Drink of Water called Here We Are, Together. It’s a similar format to Water in that the text is actually a poem and the illustrations will be photographs from all over. The subject of the book is parents and children around the world. I think it’s going to be a really beautiful book. It looks like it’ll be out in 2005.
     Finally, I’ve just started work on a children’s novel that deals with two of the biggest events during my childhood years — man’s exploration of space, and the Vietnam War. I’m at the very beginning of this and expect to spend at least the next year on it. But it’s very interesting as an adult to research events I experienced as a kid. And, well, besides that, there’s my banjo playing!

Literary Type — September 2002

Doubling the size of the $275 million, 7,000-volunteer Peace Corps wouldn’t do much to alleviate the poverty and hopelessness that foster terrorism. For, in reality, the Peace Corps does more to make us Americans feel good about ourselves than it does to fight that poverty. Instead, we need to change the economic policies that I often find punishing the very villagers I am trying to help.