Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett here. Today is Martin Luther King day. Dr. King (born January 15, 1929) was assassinated on April 4, 1968, almost fifty-five years ago. Thinking about that, I’ve been trying to remember my reaction to his death. Sad to say, I can’t even remember hearing about it at the time.
I suppose it isn’t too surprising that I wasn’t paying much attention to anything outside my own little bubble. I was twenty and a junior at Bates College. As regular readers of this blog already know, I tend to hang onto mementos, so I still have my wall calendar from 1968. In the square for April 4 there are three notations. It was my father’s birthday. He was fifty-eight. There was a band concert at 9 PM. And Rob Players elections were scheduled for 8:15. Robinson Players took up a large portion of my free time. We were in final rehearsals for a reprise at graduation of our March 29 and 30 production of Much Ado About Nothing, for which I was one of three student directors. Finals were about to start because Bates had a two-full-semesters-and-one-short-term year. And in just eighteen days I would be on my way to Germany to meet (and break up with) a boyfriend who was stationed there in the U. S. Army.
gendarmes blocking the road to the Sorbonne
That trip was . . . interesting. In addition to seeing some of the usual tourist sites in Germany, England, Scotland, and France, I ended up as an eyewitness to two sets of student riots. The first was in Leeds, England, where we stopped to visit a college friend who was in the Junior Year Abroad program. The second was in Paris. I wrote “riot following” on my calendar on May 11. Wikipedia’s list of significant events for 1968 lists “Paris student riots” as taking place on May 13, but by then I was back home. I’m not entirely sure what any of those students were protesting, but I know the gendarmes were out in force to stop them. Another JYA friend, this one in Paris, advised us not to speak English in case the riot turned anti-American.
students marching as seen from safe window perch
Sometime in first few weeks after I returned to my parents’ house in Walden, New York and went to work sorting checks at a local bank, Bobby Kennedy came through the area on his campaign for President. I remember going to see him and shaking his hand and being completely turned off by how squishy it felt. On June 5 he was assassinated. That I do remember. I’m not sure he would have made a good president, but given that Richard Nixon was elected that November, he couldn’t have been worse than what we ended up with. Since I turned twenty-one in October, that was the first election I voted in, casting my ballot for Hubert Humphrey and (Bates graduate and Maine Senator) Edmund Muskie.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The calendar for June, July, and August consists mostly of entries that read either “Sandy called” or “called Sandy.” Yup. My future husband was definitely in the picture. He had been waiting in the wings, literally, and on the first of July he asked me to marry him. There were several visits back and forth between New York and Maine until, in September, we started our senior year together. We made our engagement official on the twenty-first of November when he put a ring on my finger during a performance of Barefoot in the Park. He was on stage as the telephone repair man at the time and I was on stage crew, holding onto a door in the set that wouldn’t stay closed on its own. We came face-to-face, out of view of the audience, just long enough to create a truly unforgettable moment.
As you can see from the pages shown here, every day was busy. Catching the news was a low priority. I probably knew about the first Apollo missions, but they didn’t make much of an impression. Ditto on the Olympics—winter games in February in France and summer games in Mexico in October. Reports from Viet Nam and news of anti-war protests during the Democratic National Convention in August struck more of a chord, but that was mostly because my father thought all demonstrators were “communist dupes” and I, although I was not one of them, strongly disagreed. Just a year later, Sandy and I were married and he had joined the U. S. Navy in order to avoid being drafted.
Like any given year, 1968 had both low points and highlights. On a national and international level, things were not great, but I have no complaints about the personal side of my life. Most of those memories are pretty darn good.
Bates “pin” given as place holder for engagement ring
Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others, including several children’s books. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Her most recent publications are The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries (a collection of three short stories and a novella, written as Kaitlyn) and I Kill People for a Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Cozy Mysteries (written as Kathy). She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Monday), Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), special guest Albert Waitt (Wednesday) Sandra Neily (Thursday), and Dick Cass (Friday).
Very soon – as I was reading – I got interested in how – in the first 100 pages, Grisham’s employed the “I can’t tell you now”, “I can’t tell you everything I know”, “I can’t tell you here”, “I can’t let you look at the file that is right here in my hand because I am afraid/untrusting/paranoid” and “If you meet me tomorrow, I’ll tell you more” technique. I have to admit, I got a little frustrated, but I could see, story-wise, what he was using the page space for:
Or are you a hare?
I appreciate his sharp eye and incisive writing style, and was so pleased to find his newest book, We Don’t Know Ourselves – A Personal History of Modern Ireland under my tree.
Last month I heard her being interviewed on the CBC, and it was evident her lens on the media was shaped by her many years at The Buffalo News—a regional rather than a national newspaper—one reason I’m especially eager to read this book.
These are great to have on hand when young friends visit. But sometimes a woman just needs to settle in with a book ostensibly written for kids, and McCloskey’s illustrated tales —like those of E.B. White, who also set his children’s stories in Hancock County—are deeply pleasurable reads no matter one’s age.
resolutions which include finally writing that book you’ve always dreamed of writing, I am here to help you along on your journey, by sharing pieces of advice I’ve gotten over the years which have proved singularly unhelpful. I share them as a warning against the world of writing advice with this caveat: Don’t take them at face value, or assume they are true for you, until you’ve tested them against your own experience, your own instincts, and seen whether they advance your writing or impede it. Some of them may work for you.
reread it, excise it, cut it, leave it out. This is something I totally disagree with. I have some bits in books I’ve written over the years that still make me cry when I reread them. It just may be that there’s nothing wrong with powerful emotion in our books. If you have a section you’re worried about because someone has given you the advice above, try it out on a few beta readers and see if they think it should be cut. Always be ready to listen to advice but also be open to listening to your instincts. In the end, it is YOUR work.
person who can’t tackle a project without an outline or some signposts to guide you along the way, then yes, do an outline. It doesn’t have to be the kind we learned in 6th grade. But many writers aren’t plotters but pantsers, and love the excitement of discovery that comes with waiting to find out what happens next. See advice in 2, above. You have to actually write for a while to discover what kind of a writer you are, and that means hours at the keyboard, by yourself, finding yourself as a writer, not waiting to be told who you are by someone else.
you, the muse appears, or you’re inspired by a great idea. Nope. Despite the fact that we’re surrounded by those people who say, “I always wanted to write, but I tried it once and it was hard,” the truth is that writing is hard, but writers go to their desks and write on the days when their heads ache, when they’d rather rub themselves with sandpaper, when it seems like everything they write is gravel. Writing is a job–often a great job–but still a job, and so we go to work. This means you will be there, at your desk, fingers curled over the keys, at the magic moment when the fluttery little muse deigns to visit and whisper words in your ear. When you suddenly get into a flow so exhilarating you can hardly catch your breath. But we earn those moments by spending time with gravel or the merely adequate.
Charlene D’Avanzo 
