Professor Komagum--Book Proposal

Book Proposal:

Professor Komagum:

Finding peace and losing my sanity in Uganda

By Steven Lang Youngblood

I.                    Overview

Harriet and Phillip seemed like a typical married couple, at least until a tragic murder-suicide made orphans out of their six skinny, frightened children. Months after meeting the orphans and their savior in Uganda, I still find their story as compelling as it is tragic.

My book Professor Komagum opens (and closes) with the story of these six orphans and how an unlikely series of events, beginning with some peace journalism seminars I taught in rural Uganda, lead to their salvation.

In between, Professor Komagum tells the fascinating, sad, and sometimes comical story of my 10 month odyssey teaching peace and learning about myself in Uganda. It is the story of how Uganda’s journalists united to make their election day violence free, but also the story of how I managed to avoid drowning on a whitewater rafting trip and getting stomped into cinders by an angry rhino. It’s the story of how two charities half a world apart teamed up to feed starving kids at elementary school in northwestern Uganda, but also the tale of how I was menaced by swooping bats during an ill-advised stay in a jungle tree house. (I escaped unscathed, at least physically).

Despite its exotic locale, Professor Komagum  is not a travel guide. And, despite the fact that I am a professor, there’s only a small whiff of academic dogma in these pages. Instead, the book is a journey of discovery, set in places that most of us will never see, let alone think about.

I’m not sure exactly how to categorize Professor Komagum , except that I think it’s a pretty interesting read. I hope you’ll agree.

II.                 Comparable titles

Since Professor Komagum is so unique, doing an effective market analysis is a bit tricky.

The good news is that there are a number of current titles under the categories travel biography (14,480 current Amazon hits), travel essays (22,480), and Uganda (10,558). The most current titles in these categories include:

Travels Along the Edge: 40 Ultimate Adventures for the Modern Nomad--From Crossing the Sahara to Bicycling Through Vietnam by David Noland (Paperback - Sep 2, 1997)

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York Review Books Classics) by Patrick Leigh Fermor and Michael Gorra (Paperback - Jun 6, 2006)

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Passing Through by kregg p.j jorgenson (Paperback - Sep 18, 2007)

Life is a Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel by Judie Fein (Paperback - Aug 1, 2010)

The Best Travel Writing 2010: True Stories from Around the World by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly and William Dalrymple (Paperback - Sep 1, 2010)

The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda by Andrew Rice (Hardcover - May 26, 2009)

Mzungu: A Notre Dame Student in Uganda by Michael Sweikar (Paperback - Nov 20, 2007)

First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army by Peter H. Eichstaedt (Hardcover - Feb 1, 2009)

Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism by Thomas Kohnstamm (Kindle Edition - April 22, 2008) - Kindle Book

As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires by Bruce Weber (Kindle Edition - Mar 17, 2009)

Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy by Michael Tucker (Kindle Edition - Jul 10, 2007)

Although Professor Komagum might loosely be compared to these books, it is actually quite unique, and would draw not only from devoted readers of these genres, but from others with an interest in any of the social sciences (590,000 Amazon titles), history, politics, and world cultures (53,000 available titles on Amazon), and journalism (30,000 titles). In short, Professor Komagum is an anomaly: a niche product with a potentially vast audience.

III.               About the author

I am a tenured communications professor at Park University in Parkville, Missouri. In this role, I have traveled extensively as a lecturer, journalist, and researcher. These sojourns have been sponsored by my university but mostly by the U.S. State Department, several U.S. embassies, U.S.A.I.D., and by international organizations like UNICEF and People to People International.

I recently completed a $270,000 project sponsored by the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development to teach Peace, Development, and Electoral Journalism in Uganda in 2010-2011. The project’s goal was to prevent media induced or exacerbated violence associated with the March, 2011 presidential election. We succeeded. Professor Komagum is based on my experiences in Uganda.

I am a two-time J. William Fulbright Scholar (Moldova, 2001 and Azerbaijan, 2007).

I am also a long-time newspaper columnist, and have been published in a variety of places, including such boondocks publications as the Chisinau (Moldova) Observer, the Baku (Azerbaijan) Sun, and the Parkville (Missouri) Luminary, for which I am a weekly columnist. Some of these essays, and my other neurotic musings, have also been published widely on the web, largely through websites of my own creation that detail my experiences abroad. (For example, http://captain.park.edu/syoungblood/peace.htm )

I also network extensively on Facebook (personal account and Peace Journalism group) and Twitter (@PeaceJourn), and through speaking engagements in my local area (Rotary and Literature clubs, for example), on a national stage (at various gatherings of the American Council on Education and the Broadcast Education Association), and internationally (University of Cape Town, South Africa). Of course, as a professor, there are myriad possibilities for networking and marketing my work. I am reasonably articulate, and have worked in both radio and TV, so appearances on broadcast outlets are second nature to me.

In short, I am comfortable and adept, promoting my work on any platform and for any audience.

IV. Outline/chapter list

Professor Komagum: Finding peace and losing my sanity in Uganda

1. Foreword
2. Phillip, Harriet, Betty and the orphans
3. Discovering peace journalism—Azerbaijan, Republic of Georgia
4. Planting seeds for Ugandan project
5. Teaching peace journalism in Uganda in 2009—of roads, famines, refugees
6. About peace journalism and ethics
7. Launching peace journalism project 2010-11: settling in, teaching and traveling, students study abroad
8. Bomb in Kampala rattles professor, students
9. R&R: Ugandan wedding, eating ants, national parks
10. Primary election violence leads to doubts; peace clubs formed
11. Learning about Uganda: local newspapers, witchcraft, corruption, culture of dependency
12. More R&R: rafting, rhinos, tree house of horrors
13. Race to election day—can violence be prevented; peace clubs blossom
14. Living in Uganda—surviving hotels, “food”
15. Election day tensions
16. Barbara and 48 more orphans
17. Post election—unrest, national peace clubs formed
18. Leaving Uganda—assessing the peace journalism project; missing friends
19. Bonus material—columns from earlier peace projects with People to People International
20. Appendix: Project assessment report; Peace Journalism resources

IV.              Sample (To request Chapters 1-2, please email me. )

Professor Komagum:

Finding peace and losing my sanity in Uganda

FOREWORD

The Spring of 2011, thanks to the Egyptian revolution and uprisings in Syria, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, will forever be known as the Arab Spring. These events have disproven the theory that Americans don’t care about what happens elsewhere in the world. If anything, the drone of 24-hour cable news and incessant binary clutter from the Internet prove the opposite—that we have an almost insatiable curiosity about what goes on around us. Yet, I believe this curiosity is seldom sated by the media. I think what we want to know is what’s really going on in Egypt, what life is really like under Gaddafi, and how protesters are really managing to evade Assad’s iron fist.

Since I returned home, I’ve been asked “How was Uganda?” 78,498 times. Yes, I’ve kept track. Giving a coherent answer has been nearly impossible, although I applaud and understand the questioners, who only want to know what Uganda is really like.

Although I did just return from 10 months in Uganda teaching a peace journalism project for radio reporters and managers, I can’t begin to respond to “How was Uganda?” in a few words or even a few thousand words. Thus, in a Quixotic attempt to answer this irritatingly simple question, I embarked on writing this story about the most fascinating, annoying, heartbreaking, stimulating, educational, and tiring 10 months of my life.

The following includes the liberal use of blogs and newspaper columns (some published in the Parkville MO Luminary) that I wrote during my stint in Uganda. The idea is that these on-the-spot columns/blogs provide a sense of immediacy and reflect my spirit of wide-eyed discovery, while the book’s narrative ties the columns/blogs together while providing some perspective. At any rate, that’s the theory.

PAGE ONE

Komagum (co-muh-goom)—From the Acholi, a language spoken in Northern Uganda—Def. 1. Lucky, Fortunate.

                                                --Email Steven Youngblood--