Pam June 13th, 2007
Ever since the uproar surrounding the Andrew Speaker tuberculosis case, I’ve been thinking about how much worse the 1918 pandemic might have been if people then had traveled with the same ease as we do today. Think of all the flights that could have criss-crossed the country, and even the world. Thousands more might have died. Some people, already infected, most likely would have died en route to their destinations.
In her autobiography, the writer Mary McCarthy describes the horrifying experience of traveling by train as a child, when her mother and father were stricken with influenza. The conductor threatened to put the whole family off the train. Later, both parents died of the flu. Ms. McCarthy and her brothers were left in the care of cruel and neglectful relatives, their early childhood marked forever by this tragedy.
The Great War, with its relentless demand for soldiers, also contributed to the contagion. Troop movements across Europe and the U.S. carried the disease from town to town, city to city, and port to port. How many lives might have been spared had it been peacetime?
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985.
Tags: Influenza, Pandemic of 1918, Spanish Flu
Pam June 2nd, 2007
An unexpected surprise arrived via e-mail last week. Pictures from the 2006 Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference. That was the year Pandemic! won first place in the Young Adult category of the Paul Gillette Contest, sponsored by the Pikes Peak Writers. The contest coordinator, Dawn Smit Miller, sent a link to the photographer’s web site, where the photos were posted.
The smiling faces of my fellow winners took me back to the excitement and pleasure of that night. Among the winners that year were two other members of my critique group, Meridee Cecil and Randy Fraser. And two other friends, fellow members of our Rocky Mountain Chapter of SCBWI, Ceil Boyles and Colin Murcray. Five of us from our close-knit community of children’s writers.
During the time we all waited to have our pictures taken, I felt a spirit of camaraderie, even with those writers I hadn’t met before. “What do you write?” “Where did you place?” “Tell me about your book.”
The room rocked with excited voices and laughter. And hopefulness. Winning or placing in a contest is a great confidence booster, and it’s an important asset for your writing resume.
Then, home and down to the hard work of revising and polishing. Handing out to first readers and critique groups. And a sudden jolt of reality when someone in my group said, “Back to writing. It’s not a contest anymore!”
Tags: Paul Gillette, Pikes Peak Writers Fiction Contest, Writing Contests