THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 53 interested in Africa wouldn’t read it, so I decided to write about the challenges people face in their 40s and how I dealt with those challenges while living in Africa. Wessel: What do you most—and least—enjoy about writing? Algeo: I enjoy researching the books more than I enjoy writing them, to be honest. I like nothing better than walking into an archive or library or historical society with a list of items I want to look up. It’s exciting to me. Most research trips don’t yield much, but once in a while, you find a gem. Maybe it’s an old letter that Harry Truman wrote to a friend about his road trip, or a ticket to ride New York’s first subway, or photographs about the story you’re researching that have never been published before. That’s the best part, the hunt for those little bits and pieces that together complete the story. Becker: I love writing the twist, writing those lines where everything you thought you understood is flipped on its head, and imagining readers’ reactions when they get there. That’s a large part of what I’m in it for. Most of my novel ideas start with “what if we thought x … and then it was actually y.” The chapters I enjoy writing the least are those right before a big reveal or twist. I’m so desperate to get there that it can sometimes make it feel like a bit of a slog doing that final buildup. But it’s vitally important not to rush those! Corsino: My book is primarily recipes; much of it was already written and extensively field-tested from years of student successes and failures. What was fun was reimagining some of them to work better in a home kitchen and reformatting them for home use and not industry use. I had to change the tone and vernacular quite a bit. My least favorite part of writing a book was all the formatting and editing it requires. I self-published, so I built and edited the entire thing in-house. If a page number did not line up well with a particularly large recipe, I needed to edit all 117 pages. Truman took in the summer of 1953, shortly after they left the White House. At that time ex-presidents didn’t receive pensions or Secret Service protection, so it was just the two of them driving cross-country in their Chrysler, staying in motels and eating in roadside diners. So, more than just the story of their trip, it’s the story of life in America in the middle of the 20th century. My most recent book, New York’s Secret Subway, tells the story of the city’s first subway, a pneumatic-tube line built clandestinely, but at the same time looks at the history of mass transit and politics in the Gilded Age. Becker: There is that piece of fleeting hope you hold on to when a loved one has been involved in some sort of tragedy but hasn’t been confirmed as a victim yet. In real life that normally ends only one way, so I wanted to construct a story where there was more than met the eye. Now I have so many ideas I’ll never get through all of them. Corsino: This first book stems from my students and curriculum. I thought of what I do in my introductory culinary arts classes and how I developed that successful curriculum. Then, I moved from there toward how the average person may want to learn. Horie: My husband’s first overseas assignment was in Tanzania. I thought it was a very special and rare opportunity to live in Africa, so I wanted to document my experiences there. But I figured that if I wrote only about life in Africa, people who aren’t Derek Corsino Tomoko Horie COURTESY OF DEREK CORSINO COURTESY OF TOMOKO HORIE “I enjoy researching the books more than I enjoy writing them, to be honest.” —Matthew Algeo
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