LYNN – Lynn native Evelyn Elwell Uyemura may now live in Southern California, but her roots in Lynn are very apparent in her creative writing journey.
Elwell Uyemura graduated from Lynn Classical in 1969. She then earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Merrimack College, a master’s degree in English literature from Auburn University and a second master’s degree in linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University.
She used these degrees to go into a teaching profession where she taught writing and English. As she retired last year, Elwell Uyemura chose to take on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge.
NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge for aspiring and seasoned writers to write 1,600 words per day for an entire month. The understanding behind that is that a book can be completed in just 30 days if a writer can keep up with that rigorous schedule.
“People would ask me, ‘What do you want to do when you retire?’” Elwell Uyemura reflected. Her response to that question was, “I have this book that I want to write, and I didn’t know if I would be able to do it, I was just really happy to find that I did have the ability.”
This NaNoWriMo challenge is typically done in the month of November, but Elwell Uyemura chose to avoid additional stress around Thanksgiving. She began writing last October, and after six weeks, she had a finished novel on her hands, which Elwell Uyemura decided to “put out into the world.”
The synopsis for her novel “A Girl from Lynn” is as follows: It’s 1857, and 16-year-old Kitt Newhall of Lynn has plans for her life, but her plans are sidelined by an accident, labor unrest, abolitionism, illness and the Civil War – and by love. The historic novel set in Lynn is based on a true story of the first major strike in the shoe industry, which Lynn is known for.
The novel has “a lot of local color” in the story and includes landmarks that many from Lynn would know, like High Rock Tower. Elwell Uyemura said inspiration struck for this book when she came across a historical item that said the first major labor strike was in Lynn – and that women had a large role in it.
She said the more she dug into researching that labor strike, the more Lynn historical connections she found, and the story shaped itself. Since the book is partially fiction and partially based on historical records, Elwell Uyemura included where those distinctions lie at the end of her novel.
“This book is dedicated to working people everywhere who have struggled for fair recompense and respect for their labor,” Elwell Uyemura wrote in her novel’s dedication. “In particular, it is dedicated to the young women who played such an important role in the industrial revolution in the United States and in the shoe industry specifically. And most of all, it is a love letter to my hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, a working-class city to its roots, and proudly so.”
“A Girl from Lynn” was published April 26 through Kindle Direct Publishing and is available on Amazon via Kindle. There is also a $10 paperback version which can be purchased here: https://tinyurl.com/A-Girl-from-Lynn.
