The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2018 59 During the 1960s a group of FS women writers from the Greatest Generation banded together to polish their craft and get their work published. BY FRANCESCA HUEMER KE L LY D uring the days when most Foreign Service spouses were called “wives” and a female FSO had to resign if she got married, a small, resource- ful group of FS women writers came together to get their work pub- lished. They were members of the Association of American Foreign Service Women* Writers’ Group, formed in 1965 by Elizabeth “Biffy” Sanders. Over four decades, the group met regularly to read and critique each other’s work. They wrote and published textbooks, children’s books, memoirs, poetry, radio scripts, personal essays, newspa- per columns and feature articles. Several of themwere émigrés who had fled from repression or even war; others served in the military or diplomatic corps. Membership ebbed and flowed over Francesca Huemer Kelly, the spouse of a newly retired Foreign Service officer and former ambassador, has worked as a freelance writer and an editor, and is cur- rently coaching high school students on their college application essays. She is a co-founder of Tales from a Small Planet, and a former FSJ AFSA News editor. She would like to thank Gail Shisler and Wendy Montanari for their memories. Wendy contributed materials and photos to this article. A LOOK BACK AT AN FS Women’s Writers’ Group *The AAFSW has since changed its name to Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide. COMING INTO THEIR OWN ‘WRITE’ the years, but the core group stayed intact, meeting at members’ homes in the Washington, D.C., area, where most of the women settled after or between overseas assignments. Those who were in the group for more than 30 years included Maria Bauer, Sally Montanari and Jeri Bird. Together they published an essay collection, AWorld of Differ- ence: A Collection by American Foreign Service Women. The book, which includes a foreword fromMrs. George P. Shultz, features memoirs fromAfghanistan, Bolivia, Italy, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Japan and other countries. Some of the authors contributed poetry or short stories instead of memoirs. The resulting publication is a colorful tapestry woven by the sort of experience that only comes from living abroad. When AWorld of Difference was published in 1987, many of the contributors had been long retired from the Foreign Service and were writing about their experiences decades before, often during the Second World War. The last of the original members of the Writers’ Group, Maria Bauer, died earlier this year. Her memoir of escaping her native Czechoslovakia during the war, Beyond the Chestnut Trees , still makes for riveting reading. She and her family fled to France, then to Spain and Portugal. Along the way, she met and married her husband, an Austrian resistance fighter. After their final escape to the United States, her husband worked for the Voice of America and then for the U.S. Information Agency, taking them back over- seas to serve their adopted country. Maria’s story echoes those of the other members of the group in its almost fictional qualities. Whether born overseas or in the United States, almost all were drawn to interesting work, often in FOCUS ON FOREIGN SERVICE AUTHORS