Paper bags and presidents: A conversation with writer John Coyne

After two years in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, John Coyne returned to the U.S. in 1964 and to a job with the Peace Corps in Washington D.C. He’d been among the first groups of Americans heading out into the world at President John F. Kennedy’s call. And, now, he was home.

Sort of.
One day, he pulled open a drawer at his home and found it filled with paper bags.

"And I suddenly realized I had been saving these paper bags every time I got one, because in Ethiopia, they didn’t have them, so any time you got a paper bag, it was valuable.”

John Coyne

During those two years, he learned to work with little. He adjusted to the extra steps it took to do so many things. And he saved his paper bags.

I spoke with John for Hard Corps, and as we talked about writers, expectations people had both then and now, and the need to tell these stories, lots of John's own small stories came out.

He's good at this, of course. He’s an established and well-published writer, the founding editor of Peace Corps Writers, which is now at Peace Corps Worldwide, and a steady voice in the Peace Corps community.

I asked John if he’d be willing to let me interview him about his service and his craft for this project, and he kindly obliged. What follows are portions of our conversation, which was close to an hour. It’s been edited down here.

We talked about how much more savvy volunteers are now, how much more they've traveled. But there’s one thing about the experience that hasn’t changed, he thought -- the reality of learning to live in the third world.

“It takes you out of your comfort zone, throws you into a new world, and you have to adapt, because it’s not going to adapt to you," he said. "You have to adapt to it.”

KH: You have a story on the Peace Corps site about joining the Peace Corps with the first group of volunteers who went to Ethiopia, and before leaving you got to shake JFK’s hand in the Rose Garden at the White House. In the middle of your service, he was assassinated. What do you remember how you found that out?

JC: ...We heard in the middle of the night from a guy that was teaching at the university. My roommate was a teacher at the university, and this American was a teacher at the university, and he came by, I don’t remember if it was 11 or 12 o’clock at night, to tell us ... At that time it was a little unclear that he was dead. It was so early. My roommate and I didn’t have a radio or anything. In those days we did not have iPhones or computers or anything. We were lucky to have lights. I went to a friend’s house who was about a half a mile away and woke him up ...and they had a radio. It said Kennedy has been shot as we turned on the radio. We turned on Voice of America, actually, and mainly they were talking about Johnson being president, and as soon as I heard that, I didn’t stay for anything else, I just left. (The next day) the emperor had closed down all the schools... I went to school anyway ... none of my students, all of them were there, it was a city school and they were on the compound, and no one would come up to me to speak to me until I signaled to one kid, walked over to him and started talking to him, and then immediately they realized that they could talk to me, and they came rushing around to question me, basically about the political procedure. Most of them thought that young John John would become president, because they were interpreting everything in terms of their own emperor... 

KH: Today, the internet abounds with resources, like your site, about the Peace Corps. Most decent-sized universities around the country have recruiters. There are blogs and books. But none of that was around when you joined. What shaped your expectations for the Peace Corps then, and how did that compare with your real experience?

JC: I was an original Kennedy kid, as we were called. I was still in college at St. Louis University and when Kennedy won, and he made that “Ask not what you can do,” (speech).  This triggered in young people, and in older people at the same time, that we can contribute. We can do something. This was the first time you really had that effect in that time period ... no one sort of had asked us to ever do anything as a collection of young people. And everybody felt, yes, we can do something ... I immediately applied and immediately got invited in a letter to come to Ethiopia, and I immediately went and got a map and tried to figure out where Ethiopia was. Our ignorance was profound...We were really unwashed. We could soak in everything...When we arrived in country in September of ‘62, at the tail end of the rainy season, the poverty was quite overwhelming. It was cold. We’d gone to Africa looking for Tarzan and we arrived in a country that was at 8,000 feet. It was rainy. The weather was miserable. It changed very rapidly... It was difficult. The language was difficult. Everything was “foreign” to us. Luckily, we met up with people who were incredibly open and friendly and accepting. We were an oddity, all of these young Americans walking around on foot. Foreigners never really walked anywhere... and there were a lot of us... so walking down the street in groups, we were a sight to be seen...

KH: Your first book was published in 1972 and since you’ve written about golf, a popular collection of American horror stories, and about the Peace Corps. How did your time in Ethiopia shape you as a writer?

JC: Like anybody who wants to be a writer or becomes a writer, one of the things in the back of my mind was... I wanted to get out of the midwest. I needed to get out on a personal level, and also on a writing level...You just wanted the experience. You didn’t know what it was going to be or how you were going to handle it, but you just knew there was more to life than just where you were living...

KH: You have written more than 25 fiction and non-fiction books. Do you have any Peace Corps stories that you haven’t told, ones that you’re saving, or ones that haven’t come out, or have you told all your stories?
JC: My wife would say, please, let’s finish with your stories. But she was a never volunteer, you know... I’m actually writing a novel now which I think in my own humble way is my best book. It has a big Peace Corps element in it, it’s called “Long Ago and Far Away.” I’m working on that now. So we’ll see. 

After John and I spoke, the paper bag story stuck with me. I could picture this young American hoarding paper bags without really knowing why, changed in big ways, but also small ones, by two years in a strange place. So this morning, I e-mailed him one last question. "Do you still find yourself collecting paper bags, or carrying on any other things you picked up from your time in Ethiopia?" I wrote.
"Actually, I do collect books on Africa, books by Peace Corps volunteers," he wrote back. "But not paper bags."