John Coyne was working on his master’s degree in English at Western Michigan University in 1962 when he saw a chance to go on the kind of adventure that might inspire the novels he hoped to write, or at least teach him lessons that Western couldn’t. He joined the Peace Corps, which had just been created the year before by President Kennedy.

“There’s nothing as educational as a change of scenery,’’ Coyne said from his home in Westchester, N.Y. He then quoted from Carl Sandburg’s The Sins of Kalamazoo: “The sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson. The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.”

Coyne, whose latest book is to be released in May, was 25 when he got on the plane to Washington, D.C., where he would be trained. His next stop was Ethiopia.

He appreciated his time in “drab” Kalamazoo. Coyne grew up in Midlothian, Ill. He graduated from high school with the dream of being a writer. He earned a bachelor’s degree at St. Louis University, then came to WMU. Coyne remembers studying here under poet John Woods. He also worked at WMUK-FM and taught high school classes in Battle Creek.

But Coyne saw a chance to get an adventure worth writing about through the new Peace Corps.

He wasn’t the first, but he was “maybe the second or third” WMU student to join the Corps. He entered with college friend Bill Donohoe.

“We didn’t know what we were doing. No one had tried this experiment before. Certainly it was an incredible new adventure. We were swept up by Kennedy,” he said.

Coyne ended up in remote Ethiopian villages that had no electricity or running water. He vividly remembers entering huts, “and you’d see pinned to the wall, torn out of a magazine, a picture of Kennedy.”

He taught in Ethiopian schools with the modest goal of “teaching that the world is round, to a whole society that believes the world is flat.”

But Coyne was the one learning lessons. “You learned the obvious ones, you learned that you’re in the position to learn more and do more than you realized, you learned that you’re capable to do a lot, and you learned the basic ones that people are pretty much alike wherever you go in the world,” he said.

“You also learned the complexities of society, one of the ones we’re running into in Iraq, that ethnic and religious backgrounds, centuries old, are very powerful forces, and you just can’t say, because you have a way of looking at the world, that they should look at the world the same way. You’d like to think it works that way, but it just doesn’t.”

Coyne then worked in the Peace Corps’ Washington office, returned to Ethiopia as a staff member, and then returned to Western after 1964 to finish earning his degree.

“I did write a book afterwards about Ethiopia, which thankfully has never seen the light of day,” Coyne said.

He became a prolific author of horror novels as “the poor man’s Stephen King.” For a period after 1981, Coyne wrote a book a year until he “just burned out.”

Suffering from writer’s block, Coyne rejoined the Peace Corps in 1995 to work in recruitment in Washington. He also founded the RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) Writers and Readers newsletter. He also edited Living On the Edge (1999, Curbstone Press), a collection of fiction by writers who had been in the Peace Corps.

His newsletter became the Web site peacecorpswriters.org, a networking hub for writers as diverse as fiction and travel writer Paul Theroux and crime novelist Kinky Friedman, currently running for Texas governor.