Interview with William Patrick
Interview with William B. Patrick on the Making of Saving Troy
The following Q & A resulted from correspondence that occurred in May and June of 2006 between William B. Patrick, author of Saving Troy, and interviewer Fred Balzac, a freelance writer based in Jay, NY. The Q & A formed the basis of a two-part article Balzac wrote and published in the Lake Champlain Weekly (Plattsburgh, NY) August 2nd and 9th, 2006, and is reprinted here with permission of both participants (copyright © William B. Patrick and Fred Balzac):
Q: You’re an established poet and prose fiction writer who has also written (and seen produced) several screenplays and at least one play, among many other highly lauded professional achievements. What was the original impetus for “Saving Troy,” which is essentially a work of journalism? What compelled you to, at the project’s most basic level, ride around in fire trucks and other emergency vehicles and go on to tell the story of these heroic community servants and the oftentimes bizarre people and situations they encounter?
William B. Patrick: I was teaching in a college Creative Writing Department in Virginia and, essentially, I had grown tired of the job. One day, I was sitting in my office, staring out the window at a parking lot full of students coming and going, and I thought, If I could do anything at all, what would it be?
. . . I’d ride on a rescue truck for a year and write about what I experienced. That was the original impetus for the book – simply what I thought was an interesting idea for a non-fiction book. What I wasn’t allowing myself to remember, I guess, was an accident I had been part of many years before, working on a horse farm where a man was killed, and feeling somewhat responsible for not being able to save him. Volunteer EMTs and a paramedic had come to help that day, and I had ridden with them (watching them perform CPR on my friend in the back of the ambulance) to the hospital. The trauma of that incident may have been the real reason I wanted to do the book, and the final chapter of Saving Troy explores the accident and its ramifications in depth. But when it comes to the mysterious ways that ideas and projects originate, who really knows?
Q: How did you make the project happen in practical terms—e.g., gaining access to firehouses, going on calls, etc? How were you regarded by the firefighters and paramedics at the outset and how did the relationship change over time? You seem to have won their trust and confidence as related rather early in the book.
William B. Patrick: Okay, the first question first: I was lucky. The City Manager in Troy at that time was Steve Dworsky, and Steve had been my next-door neighbor when I was growing up in Troy. So I called him from Virginia and proposed the project, and he told me he was also Public Safety Commissioner, that it was all right with him if I rode along for a year with the fire department, and he would introduce me to Ed Schultz, the Chief of the department, when I returned to Troy. So when I moved back, I went down one day and met Ed. I explained my idea, which he thought was fine, and he had me sign the liability forms which said basically that I or my family couldn’t sue the City of Troy if I was maimed or killed on the job. He shook my hand, said, “Ride any rig you want, but don’t get killed, okay?”
It was as simple as that. As I said, I was lucky. It was my first non-fiction book, and I had no idea that access to a professional fire department for a year was almost impossible for a civilian to get. Apart from the liability issues, most departments don’t want a writer (who is recording calls and interviews and taking photographs of everything) around when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. The guys on my shift – the 1st Platoon at Central Station – were for the most part pretty welcoming, but it took several months to gain their trust. They were very careful about what they said at first, but after they saw I was not there to threaten them or to muckrake and that I would help out when they needed me to, they began to open up and reveal themselves. Not all of them, of course – a few were guarded right to the end, and one Assistant Chief harassed me the entire year and a half I finally spent on the job.
Q: As I recall (perhaps incorrectly), you conceived of the project prior to September 11, 2001. How was the book shaping up before that terrifying day, and how did it change afterwards? Did you feel a greater sense of urgency to complete the book, given all the attention that emergency personnel received at that time? Did you feel the prospects for the book might have been enhanced as a result of that attention? Did the project become in any way more difficult or burdened by the ongoing legacy of 9/11?
William B. Patrick: I rode with the Troy Fire Department in the mid-90s. I can’t be more specific about the dates, because even though I changed the names of almost all the patients in the book, someone could use the newspaper excerpts in the book to track down medical information about specific people. And a lot of what was happening during that year was emotional and painful, at the very least, for the participants, and I didn’t want to make things worse for any of them by exposing their names and situations in print.
Before I talk about the publishing aspects, let me give you an idea of the scope of the material I collected in eighteen months: I recorded 221 90-minte audio cassettes, shot 1100 b&w photos, filled five thick notebooks with observations and notes, videotaped over 60 hours of calls and interviews, and read more than 200 books about firefighting, EMS, and Creative Non-fiction. It took me all of one year just to inventory what was on the cassettes and videos, another year to write a screenplay, and six months to pull together the material for a proposal and write the Prologue and first two chapters. The hardest part of writing non-fiction is selecting what to write about, and if you have too much material, as I clearly did, it makes that selection process a lot more difficult. So my concern was writing a good book, and keeping it accurate, and the whole process took me about ten years.
What happened on 9/11/01 has had vast repercussions for our country and the world, as it turns out, and it certainly affected the publishing world. But I reported and researched and wrote a proposal for this book that was shopped to major publishers three years before 9/11 occurred, and for my book, the reactions of those publishers then is probably more telling than trying to chart the effects of a huge national tragedy on the book choices that editors at major houses make. To my project, they basically responded one of three ways: “Who cares about Troy, NY?” or, “We’re already doing a firefighter book,” or, even, “Who cares about firefighters?” And that dismissive attitude was typical every time I tried to tell them that Saving Troy was a worthwhile book.
Saving Troy is a book about a year with one group of professional firefighters and paramedics in a smallish, upstate New York city, during a time of fiscal crisis and political incompetence. It’s a book that puts the reader squarely in the middle of the action, and it gives that reader an inside look at what it’s like to do that difficult job day in and day out for a year. It gives a gritty, accurate assessment of life in a professional, contemporary fire department, where about 75% of the calls are related to emergency medical services and firefighters are very divided about the contradictory demands of having to be a healer one moment and an aggressive fire hero the next. It moves between chapters that re-create harrowing calls and bridge chapters in the voices of the firefighters themselves, where they tell stories about their amazing experiences and dissect their emotions. And, on top of that, it has 48 interesting photographs. Frankly, there is not another book like it, nor has there been, and that made publishers nervous.
There are lots of other books about firefighters, and about major disasters like 9/11 and the Worcester fire of a few years ago where six men were lost, and about a life spent on the job by active or retired fire chiefs in big cities like New York or Boston. We’re used to seeing those. They’re what we expect, and publishers, like Hollywood movie studios, are always trying to fulfill what they perceive as the expectations of buyers. So if a book seems like all the others, or addresses a huge incident that the news media covered again and again, then publishers are interested. They think of books as cookies or shaving cream or dresses, and they want to sell a lot of those products they make. They are more reluctant if they have to demonstrate some vision and pursue a direction that seems less mainstream.
So, yes, 9/11/had an effect, and I certainly considered its importance in shopping my book around, but a bias against unusual approaches to material has existed in the publishing world for a long time. If you have a story that you believe in, you can’t let them keep you from getting it out there. Readers will vote with their dollars and their time – if a book is good, they’ll buy it and read it and talk about it with their friends, no matter who publishes it.
Q: You figure in the story mostly on the periphery—a largely omniscient witness to the events whose presence is only occasionally acknowledged by the main protagonists of the book. What were the issues you considered in deciding how to handle your role in the story? To what extent is “Saving Troy” a contemporary version of New Journalism (a la Capote, Mailer, and Wolfe) and how is it different from New Journalism?
William B. Patrick: New Journalism is an awfully big subject for here – I’m reading another book about it now, called The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, by Marc Weingarten. If you mean by New Journalism the idea that writers should immerse themselves in their subjects through research and direct participation, achieve accuracy in representing their materials, pursue unique structures in telling their stories, use lots of scenes and dialogue and action and description and the other tools of fiction writing to establish veracity, and do it all with a unique style, then yeah, I certainly come off like a new journalist in Saving Troy. I thought all those techniques would make a better book.
I kept myself pretty much out of the book as a character (though I do pop up here and there, briefly, at calls or in the firehouse) until the last regular chapter and the final bridge chapter, which is in my voice. I struggled with that at the beginning of the project. In the first draft I did, I was definitely a character, but I came to see that it really wasn’t my story, for the most part, so I pulled myself out of it. My intention was to show the reader what I saw – put her or him right up front in the Medic Rig, between two firefighter paramedics – and let the drama unfold, and asking the reader to concentrate on what I was going through during those calls was a distraction.
Q: The book has an interesting format (similar to the form I’ve envisioned for a project of my own, by the way): incidents and anecdotes interspersed between background and history on Troy and direct “testimony” by the emergency personnel. How did the form of the book emerge? How does it serve the content and overall narrative?
William B. Patrick: In one sense, the structure of the book is a pretty direct outgrowth of the combined structures of my other books. I have used photographs, and dramatic monologues, and real newspaper excerpts, and chronological frameworks, among other effects, in three of my other books, and I just decided to combine them all here in this one. I had so much rich material that I didn’t want to lose any of the forms, and I wanted to see how they would work mosaically, or kaleidoscopically, when you juxtaposed them. Like in editing movies, one image pushed up against another changes how we see and feel about both images, so I was interested to see what happened if I started the book with 24 action photos, for example. The only other book that does that, as far as I know, is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the effect is startling there. You are forced to deal with the images in those photos first, before you read any text, and I found that I was immediately drawn in by that technique. I wanted to see if I could do the same thing in Saving Troy. Or what would happen if the day-to-day routine of being on the job – the EMS calls and fires and firehouse life – was interspersed with very intimate dramatic monologues in the voices of the firefighters themselves? I was intrigued by the new possibilities I could achieve by combining all those different forms.
Q: There are some very memorable incidents in the book. I’m thinking of, for example, the obese woman stuck in the bathroom and the decomposing corpse found in the wall. You emphasize at the outset that “Saving Troy” is a work of nonfiction and that neither any dialogue nor characters have been fabricated. Yet the strange events seem to transpose the story to another, more novelistic realm. Can you speak to the issue of content selection—how you sought to balance the bizarre with the everyday?
William B. Patrick: Some of the selection process was easy: I wanted to include most of the dramatic or emotional stuff that I couldn’t forget. That I still can’t forget. So most of that made it into the book. But the Troy Fire Department answered almost 9000 emergency and fire calls the first year I rode with them, and I worked the same 24 hours on, 72 off, that the 1st Platoon worked, so I could have seen the majority of one-quarter of that total – or roughly 2,250 calls – during the course of that year. I rode every rig in Central Station, and didn’t sleep much on the days I worked, but I probably saw only 1000 or 1200 calls. Still, that’s a huge number to choose from.
I built the chapters around the obvious: which calls in each particular month were most compelling, unusual, bizarre, or revelatory? Start with them, and then add other, perhaps more typical calls as relief, comic or otherwise. But there’s a lot of really weird life to be found out there. The old saw that truth is stranger than fiction doesn’t come close to describing everyday occurrences for many firefighters and EMS personnel in this country.
Q: You open the book with an epigram by Chekhov, “If you want to talk of the whole world, talk of your village.” This is a story that is strongly rooted in the physical world and ethos of Troy, New York. How is “Saving Troy” a universal story, and what steps did you take, if any, as a reporter and author to ensure that it didn’t read as just a regional book? How is the book being received outside of the Capital region or even New York State/the Northeast?
William B. Patrick: Saving Troy is, by definition, a regional book. It’s the story of one year with a particular group of firefighters and paramedics in one small city. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. But it also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to extrapolate these experiences to the larger world of emergency services workers in other, larger cities, states, and countries. The job of saving people is pretty universal, no matter what language is being spoken.
The readers from other parts of the country who have bought the book, and I have heard from people in Hawaii, Illinois, California, Wisconsin, and about fifteen other states, all say a variation of what a firefighter in Green Bay said: If you change the names and the faces, you’ve got my department here. The work, the danger, the heartbreak, the relief, the black humor, the compulsion to help – these traits are pretty universal, I think.
Q: What has the reaction been from emergency personnel? Has there been a noticeable difference in reaction between firefighters/EMS workers and civilians?
William B. Patrick: Well, my answer may not be representative of everyone, because I’ve heard from a relatively small percentage of the 3000 or so people who have bought the book so far. But those who do contact me express gratitude for my efforts to show the general public what they do. One woman paramedic wrote to me, “I am so proud that someone took the time to educate people that we aren’t just three numbers and a ride to the hospital.” The emergency personnel who talk to me tell me that no one has told their story in enough depth to portray the true, complex emotions that accompany the work, and they feel like this book is trying to do that.
Q: What can we expect from Hudson Whitman, as well as William B. Patrick, next?
William B. Patrick: In terms of new writing projects, I’m working on a book called Twin Siamese Lice: How to Spark Your Child’s Imagination with Writing, which will be a book for parents about how they can share the creative process with their kids. I have been performing writing residencies in elementary, middle and high schools for the past ten years, and I want to share the exercises I developed, as well as the poems and stories by kids that resulted from those exercises. I’m doing it with a friend of mine named DeLoss McGraw, who is a painter and illustrator, and he’s going to create illustrations in response to the poems and stories included in the book. And I have a couple of other writing projects stacked up on the runway, but I’m trying to keep them quiet while I work on the book about writing with kids.
In terms of publishing, Hudson Whitman is looking for books that are well-written and original and moving, first of all. Good reads. But also books with a large, identifiable niche market, like emergency personnel. Creative non-fiction, probably — literary books with good commercial potential. Sort of what a lot of publishers are looking for, but our press involves the authors in the whole process of planning and publishing and marketing their books, not just the initial writing process and then making changes on the galleys. But I have to make Saving Troy a success before Hudson Whitman can publish another title. It’s a challenging process, but it’s great to watch a book come to life.
