John Coyne

Letter to a First-Time Peace Corps Writer

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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 another. Your whole first paragraph or first page may have to be guillotined after your piece is finished, but there can be no second paragraph (which contains your true beginning) until you have a first.

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“Long Ago and Far Away” review in The Pelham Weekly

Review of Long Ago and Far Away in The Pelham Weekly

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“Long Ago and Far Away” Travels Through Time in John Coyne’s Latest Novel

By Alex Wolff

Renowned Pelham author John Coyne’s latest novel “Long Ago and Far Away” draws on his life and experience to tell a tale of star crossed lovers, spanning several decades and traveling across four continents.

Revolving around the tragic 1973 death of a young woman in Ethiopia, “Long Ago and Far Away” uses a series of flashbacks in that country, Spain, New York, Washington and elsewhere to tell the story of Parker Bishop and Irish McCann, lovers who were driven apart by the death of their friend and the resulting trial which left questions as to whether the death was a murder or an accident.

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Review of Long Ago And Far Away by Karel R. Amaranth, MPH, MA

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Having just returned from east Africa myself I was drawn to this book’s setting in Ethiopia. I was particularly interested in the historical backdrop of the deterioration Haile Selassie’s rule and the impact on the people of Ethiopia as they were plunged deeper and deeper into poverty and political instability. The fact that John Coyne was in Ethiopia as a Peace Corps Volunteer I knew would give the book authenticity of the place and historical context. The book certainly delivers as a record of that time in the chapters written from the voice of a third person narrator.

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Jackie Schlenger Reviews Long Ago And Far Away

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Coyne displays in his previous twenty plus books culminate in this novel in a very satisfying way. He very skillfully takes to the land of Ethiopia during the reign of Hale Selassie, just prior to the demise of the empire at the hands of Mengistu and the dergue. He reveals life from the viewpoint of young people on their own, many for the first time, ten thousand miles from home in a magical African land. He reveals the intensity of relationships formed by this experience. Relationships that endure across the decades.

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Review of Long Ago And Far Away by Kathleen Croskran

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Long Ago and Far Away by John Coyne, an ambitious novel spanning time and place, connects the disparate worlds of Parker Bishop, a former CIA agent who retreated to safety and anonymity as a proprietor of a second hand book store in Westchester County, New York — thus masking his undercover past with respectability that included a beloved wife and two daughters.

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Books That Bred [and Explain] the Peace Corps

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During the 1950s, two impulses swept across the United States. One impulse that characterized the decade was detailed in two best-selling books of the times, the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the non-fiction The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books looked at the “American way of life” and how men got ahead on the job and in society. Both are bleak looks at the corporate world.

These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s philosophy as expressed in such novels as Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Her philosophy of Objectivism proposed reason as man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. Every man, according to Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. Objectivism rejected any form of altruism.

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The Lion in the Gardens of the Guenet Hotel

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On the last day of our 1962 Peace Corps training in Ethiopia, we had a farewell dinner at the Guenet Hotel in the Populari section of the capital Addis Ababa.

The Guenet Hotel, even in 1962, was one of the older hotels in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t in the center of town, but south of Smuts Street and down the hill from Mexico Square, several miles from where we were housed in the dormitories of Haile Selassie I University.

While out of the way, this small, two story rambling hotel, nevertheless, had a two-lane, American-style bowling alley, tennis courts, and most surprising of all, an African lion in its lush, tropical gardens.

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What JFK Had To Say To Us On The White House Lawn

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A police escort with sirens blaring led our dozen Peace Corps buses in one long continuous caravan through every downtown light in Washington, D.C. It was high noon in the District the summer of 1962, less than a year after the famous postcard dropped by a PCV had been found on the Ibadan campus that almost doomed the Peace Corps and we–the 300 Ethiopia-bound Peace Corps Trainees at Georgetown University–were on our way to meet John F. Kennedy at the White House.

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