Citizenship | Literature
Select novels, short stories, and nonfiction on contemporary life.
Ben East’s nonfiction debut recounts how JFK’s bold experiment shaped diplomatic careers and influenced modern American diplomacy.
Read, Listen, Watch
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The writer is greedy, demanding, insistent. Each word must lead the reader to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a page.
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The harsh environment, the boys pushed hard by striving parents, the high expectations Koreans had for themselves and Peace Corps volunteers all made for an often grinding experience
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“Let us hope that other nations will mobilize the spirit and energies and skill of their people in some form of Peace Corps.” President Kennedy, 1961
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My writing routine: Anytime. Anywhere. Rumpled and rocking on trains or cramped on airplanes. You can’t be precious about where, when, and how you write.
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I’m pulling back the curtain on process, sharing an excerpt of David Greenlee’s ADST oral history alongside the final narrative form from Profiles in Service.
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The Peace Corps volunteers would work with the campesinos. The USAID people would help the central government deliver. This would stimulate development and social integration. It was a sweet theory.
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From Peace Corps service, Ambassador Hill knew how fraught the process of picking someone else’s leadership could be. He’d seen it fail time and again
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Ben East’s nonfiction debut recounts how JFK’s bold experiment shaped diplomatic careers and influenced modern American diplomacy.
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He would be alone, learning a new culture much as he had as a Peace Corps volunteer in Buea, Cameroon, navigating ambiguity by instinct.
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The start of war against Iran by Israel and the United States requires recognition of others’ service and misery before resuming regularly-scheduled programming on Peace.
Ben East Books 