Marie's Place

Marie's Place is a series of stories about places and personalities in Northern Colorado and Malawi, from the '60s through the '90s. The stories involve people Jim knew, and would like you to know, centering on a friend of the family named Marie, and moving to the country of Malawi, where Jim worked as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher, living on a plateau in the northern part of the country. Included are various happenings in both countries: being nearly blown off a mountain on a backpacking trip in Colorado, and living alone in a cabin in a village called Hahns Peak. The book begins with a near-death experience while Jim was living in Fort Collins, CO, and is accompanied throughout by the laughter of his Pickwickian friends of the Western Slope and the people of Malawi.



About the Author



Jim was a serious photographer from age ten, using a fifty-cent boxtop camera and a Baby Brownie to photograph the people of his town in eastern Kansas. He wrote poetry in High School and played alto sax, which he then gave up to study physics, and, later, linguistics and creative writing. All this came together in the Peace Corps, in 1962, when he got sent to Malawi to teach science and English to high school students in two rural areas of the newly-independent country in the first Peace Corps project there. After Peace Corps, he worked in a kibbutz and traveled in Europe for six months before returning to graduate studies at UCLA and later research in language teaching in Uganda. This is his second travel-memoir book.