The piece, "Over her, over me," was quite moving. It seems like a good reminder about how deeply affected paramedics and other emergency workers can be by what they see and do. How do paramedics deal with that? Is your solution music and alcohol or was that just the characters choice?
Music? Always. Alcohol? As necessary. That’s a story based on a real experience. I was working as a medic that night Lennon was shot and went on a call that, let’s just say, wasn’t hard to fictionalize. The world of emergency medicine takes a special breed. I was pretty good at it because I have this ability to temporarily compartmentalize things. But I knew that one day the box would be full of demons and they’d come out in an army too strong to fight. So I quit. This story is just one of a few which I’m still trying to chase away.
Please tell me – and the readers who have not seen your book yet – what led you to make the following statement:
Although this collection includes both fiction and non-fiction prose, it is not always obvious which is real and which is imagined. It is the author's express desire to let the reader make that distinction if they feel they must, that it places the text somewhere where they can come at it comfortably. And while just a few of the characters are real with real names, the rest are based on the experiences of the author. He makes no claim to their existence and any imagined connection to living persons are left to the full responsibility of the reader.
Well, to be honest, part of my rationale for purposely blurring the lines is in protest of the market-driven, overly genre-specific state of domestic publishing. The overt subsumation of art by “those-that-will-profit” is pretty damn disturbing. Its appropriation of things that make us feel human by the means of distribution. The golden rule - he who has the gold… rules.
If a piece of work does not thrill the sales force, include inside scoop on (insert celebrity de jour here) or offer some falsely pacifying antidote for the rampant malaise that bureaucratization has wrought, then it can’t be labeled, packaged or sold. Sorry for the rant but it’s pretty simple Marxism - eventually even the folks with money in their pocket will suffer at the hands of their own.
As I understand it, Habitus Books was formed as a response to this. And yes, it’s a disclaimer of sorts but a challenge to the reader to suspend their beliefs about the real and the imagined, to let the text take them where they will go without pre-disposed interpretation that, “Oh, well, this is what the author experienced so let me compare, contrast and critique accordingly.” This is what reader response criticism allows - that there is no single reading of a text, they create rather than discover.
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