The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

F O C U S 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 Here, the trick is finding a lit- erary outlet that matches your expertise. Are you a superb pho- tographer who also loves to trav- el to exotic spots? Perhaps National Geographic has room for your creativity. Do you have a lifelong passion for the 1956 Oldsmobile? The care and feed- ing of orchids? Creating com- puter games? The life of Jane Austen? There simply is no end to the potential subject matter or specialty magazines devoted to it. Op-eds and articles are also a lot shorter than a book, and many FSOs are world-class experts not just on countries or regions but on techni- cal issues from arms control to aviation subsidies, glob- al warming and economic assistance. Get to it; write away. For me, Canada — dishwater-dull to most observers — has proved fascinating. Canada is an alternative America, a counterculture USA in which essentially the same petri-dish mixture of culture, racial-ethnic com- binations, free-market democracy and advanced tech- nology is responding to the challenges of the 21st cen- tury in unique ways. We have much to learn from one another — if we make the effort. Canadians feel ignored by Americans, so a reasonably knowledgeable Amcit can frequently find a Canadian publication will- ing to publish something akin to “A View from Washington.” Newsletters. Some of us write a family-update newsletter. Others may do so for their community association or PTA. But there is also a wide range of professional associations that communicate with their membership. For me (and my wife Terry, also a retired senior FSO) the outlet was the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing. This nonprofit NGO stress- es the value of manufacturing for the U.S. economy, urges greater commitment to R&D in hard sciences and engineering, and emphasizes the need for work- force training so 21st-century labor can deal with 21st- century technology. In this regard, we produce a week- ly publication drawn from Internet sources (see www.nacfam.org) . The downside to a weekly newslet- ter is that you do it every week; about 10 percent of our 350-and-still-counting editions were produced while we were “on the road” outside Washing- ton. Research and editing. Throughout the foreign affairs community, there are authors looking for researchers/editors/ proofreaders/factcheckers/in- dexers, and the like. Our recently retired generation lived through the proverbially cursed “interesting times.” This reality made for sanguinary but poten- tially interesting history. If you don’t wish to write the history yourself, col- leagues and associates are often grateful if you pitch in. In my own case, Ambassador Maynard “Mike” Glitman devoted the core of his career to the NATO deterrent and Alliance unity as epitomized by the East-West struggle over intermediate-range missiles. During the negotiations with the Soviets, which ultimately culmi- nated in the 1987 INF Treaty eliminating these mis- siles, I occasionally did the substantive equivalent of holding his coat, providing a degree of technical/sub- stantive editing and drafting support for his leadership of the negotiating team. I performed the literary equivalent of the same role for Mike’s story, The Last Battle of the Cold War , which is now in editing and pro- jected for publication in the spring of 2006. Retirement Course Offering Over the past several years, the FSI retirement course has included a segment on writing as a facet of a post-Foreign Service career. Hopefully more than fill-time between resumé writing and financial plan- ning, the session offers a range of insights into writing beyond the memorandum of conversation. An eclectic panel (sometimes including me and my wife Terry) fea- tures a travel editor/author for the Washingtonian , an ambassador-novelist and a “tandem” who is the execu- tive director of a writer’s center. This is a drink-from- a-fire-hose presentation, but at the end of it, putative retirees should have a better insight into the whats and hows of writing. And perhaps they will also recognize that they can get paid for their pleasure — sometimes. n There are retired FSOs who are novelists, historians, commentators on foreign affairs, short story writers, biographers, poets and journalists.