A Conversation with Shannon Burke

Dave Maher

 Dave Maher was a paramedic for the New York City Fire Department, hired by FDNY in 1996 at the same time as the author. Dave and Shannon worked together at Station 18 in Harlem for five years.

 Dave Maher: I want you to talk a little bit about how you decided to be a writer.

 Shannon Burke: Well, I’d always written things as a kid—poetry and song lyrics, and little plays that I videotaped. Short stories. That sort of thing. In college I was an English major and I guess I wrote stories and some poetry, though I hardly showed anybody. I think I was embarrassed about it. After college I was planning on going to law school, but I wanted to go traveling first. I moved back home for about four months. I worked as a cab driver and I taught tennis. I saved about ten thousand dollars, then took off for a year, and while I was gone, over that year, I read around a hundred novels: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner, Garcia-Marquez, Fielding, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, everything. And it really was...life changing for me. By the time I came back I’d decided I wanted to be a writer.

 DM: And what’d your parents say?

 SB: They were really happy.

 DM: I detect a little sarcasm.

  SB: Uh, yeah...They weren’t bad about it. Just...I don’t think they saw it as a shrewd career decision.

 DM: So did you decide to be a paramedic then, as a day job?

 SB: No, no. That didn’t happen for a long time. I just moved around to different cities and worked shitty jobs for the next five or six years. I was in Chapel Hill for a while, where I’d gone to school. Then I was in Prescott, Arizona. I was in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago. I went to Mexico for about five months at one point.

 DM: Was there a design behind the places you went to?

 SB: Not really. The first place I went after Chapel Hill was Prescott. I just wanted to live in a small town. I’d never done that before. I was interested in the southwest and my finger sort of fell on Prescott on the map. I thought I’d check it out but then my car broke down and I sold it to the junk yard, so I got a job at the Pizza Hut and stayed.

 DM: And you were by yourself?

 SB: Yeah, yeah. It was kind of weird. For that whole time, five or six years, I just moved around by myself. I wrote during the day. I worked at night. I lived in the worst places. Like, in New Orleans for a while I lived in a transients hotel—the sort of place where homeless people sleep in the hallways. I was the weirdo who was always carrying a book. It was kind of lonely.

 DM: And you were writing during this time?

 SB: Oh yeah. All the time. Every day. Initially I wrote stories. I think I wrote about fifty bad stories, one after the other.

 DM: And they were based on things you were seeing in these towns?

 SB: Not really. It’s interesting. I mean, in retrospect it’s interesting. These were mostly stories without plots or characters.

 DM: That’s one way to do it.

 SB: That’s exactly what everyone else thought, too. My sister once said, “Hey, Shannon, maybe you should write a story where something happens.” And of course she was right. But at the time I thought that plot didn’t matter. I was obsessed with style. And I just...wasn’t seeing the big picture. Later on, it might have ended up helping me. I mean, that I spent all that time thinking about the most efficient way of describing something. Or the most pleasing way to have dialogue flow. But it would have been much easier to have gone at it from the other direction. Like, start out thinking about a plot and characters. Because at least then I could have written something that other people wanted to read, even if it wasn’t great literature. The way I did it there might have been a nice sentence or description, but when there’s no plot, people are just like, what the hell is this?

 DM: To me it sounds like the classic beginning for a lot of people, which is, you want to describe how you feel about a particular event or person, and that gets you started, but you don’t know how to put a story together.

 SB: Well, that was definitely the case with me. I didn’t know how to put a story together. But then, as time went on, I got a little better.

 DM: And so when did you decide to become a paramedic?

 SB: It was in 1992. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and one night I saw someone murdered. I was working at a book store in the French Quarter then, and the deal was, the book store gave the people at the movie theater a ten percent discount, and in return, we got to go to movies for free. And since I was making four-fifty an hour, the only thing I could do for entertainment was go to the free movie theater. I didn’t have a TV. My only other entertainment was my library card. So I saw all the movies twice. Anyway, it was maybe one in the morning, and I was coming back from the movie theater, and I heard what I thought were firecrackers, and then it was, like, oh, that was gunfire. I looked up and maybe...fifty feet away, someone was lying in the street, and a guy was walking toward me with a gun. I stopped on the sidewalk. We looked right at each other. The guy got in a car parked the wrong way on a one way street. He drove past me then turned the corner and I ran up the street, and there was this girl, this woman....

 DM: How old?

 SB: Twenty-seven. She was a tourist. A British fashion designer. She was out with her fiancé and they’d gotten mugged or something. The fiancé was just freaking out. Screaming. Trying to kiss the woman. Trying to wake her up. I saw that she was shot in the right arm. I used a t-shirt and tried to wrap up her arm. I remember the whole thing vividly, way more vividly than I remember, like, the other hundred gunshot wounds I’ve seen since then. She was unconscious and she started vomiting. And the one thing I knew at that time is that you weren’t supposed to move the neck. So the fiancé rolled her body and I held her head and we tilted her so the vomit came out. After I rolled her back I saw there was blood on the hand that had been on her head and I realized she was shot in the head, too. She died later that night. And I definitely...I felt guilty. I thought I should have known first aid or something. Like I could have saved her. Now I know better.

 DM: Now you realize it would have been hopeless if you were the surgeon general and she was shot on an operating table.

 SB: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I ended up taking an EMT class because of that. And then, right around the time I became an EMT, I broke up with my girlfriend and so I had no reason to be anywhere and I figured I might as well go to New York and work on an ambulance. I figured it would be the most extreme place to do it.

 DM: So when you went to New York City you had it already targeted in your mind that you were going to pursue a job in the fire department?

 SB: I don’t know if it was so clear at the time that I wanted to work for the fire department. I just knew I was going to try to get a job on some ambulance. I worked for the privates for a year as an EMT, and then I started going to paramedic school. I graduated from medic school in December of 1995. I went on vacation for four weeks to kind of decompress, and when I came back I realized the fire department had opened up for applications, and that I’d almost missed the hiring. By the time I showed up almost everyone had already applied. I went in on, like, the afternoon of the last day. It was a first come first serve type of situation, so all the people applying on the last day were supposed to be called up in two or three years. I went in to hand in my application, and the interviewer looked it over and saw that I had a college degree, and that I went to a good school, and I had good grades and all that, and at one point he just said, “What are you doing here? Do you know what it’s going to be like?” I said I did and that I wanted the job. After the interview I walked out and then I thought about it, and I walked back in, and I said, “Listen, I don’t know what you think, like I shouldn’t even be applying, but I really want this job. I’ve never had a job that paid this well. And I really need this job.” Basically, I let him know I was desperate. The interviewer saw I wasn’t bullshitting him, and I guess he took pity on me. He took my folder from one pile and put it in another pile, and said, “They’ll call you within the week.” And they did.

 DM: I remember that. We were both hired at the same time and sent to Harlem.

 SB: I was glad. I requested Harlem. I thought it was the badass station to go to. I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was getting in to. You remember how it was?

 DM: Oh, yeah, I don’t know how we did it. 

 SB: I remember this one job in the first month. We came into this hallway in Washington Heights. Our patient was this kid who’d been stabbed somewhere in the abdomen, and he’d crawled thirty feet down this hallway. There was a swath of blood about three feet wide. I mean, there was a ton of blood. And so we, like, followed the trail of blood and got to him and turned him over and each of us went to an arm to start an IV, and my partner looked up at me, and said, “Just so you know, Shannon, if you miss this IV he’ll die.”

 DM: Oh, God. The sympathetic veteran medic. Did you get it?

 SB: You know what? I did get it. And he missed it.

 DM: Oh, that’s perfect.

 SB: Every day it was like that. Every day some new drama. My problem was that I was so new I didn’t know what was normal. In those first months I worked with some bad medics. I thought it was normal to get in fights with the patients everyday. I thought it was normal to get in screaming arguments with bystanders. It was only later that I realized that a lot of the stuff that happened was insane.   

 DM: Have you written about it?

 SB: A little. And of course some of that is reflected in Safelight. But a lot of it was so extreme it would be hard to make it believable.  I still don’t understand why some of those people became paramedics in the first place. Or why they chose to work in Harlem.

 DM: But that all goes back to...you have to start breaking down the personality paradigm of people who go into EMS. A percentage of the guys are always going to be people who lack self esteem, so they try to ally themselves or drape themselves in a moral cause so they can feel good about themselves…Anyway, let’s get back to you. After you got hired you moved up to Harlem, right?

 SB: Not right away. After a few years.

 DM: Did you move up there so you could write about it?

 SB: Yeah, it was for that. I spent forty hours a week in Harlem, as you know, but once you move up there it’s a different story. Living there you realize that for every menace to society there are five hundred regular families just trying to get by. I grew up in the suburbs, and I imagined drugs and guns and all that. But I ended up seeing it was just a working class neighborhood.

 DM: Not even working class anymore. But I guess when you come from suburbia and go to a place like Harlem you’ve been conditioned to imagine it’s going to be like Beirut. Not that I know anything about Beirut. But you get the point.

 SB: Definitely. It’s what I thought. And I hope I got beyond that. And though the book isn’t really about Harlem, I hope my feeling for what it was like shows through.

 DM: I think it does, though I think it also shows some of the grimmer aspects. I mean, poverty and HIV and all that...Before you started writing the book did you know that you were going to write about those things? I mean, did you start with the idea that this is going to be a love story between a paramedic and a girl with HIV?

 SB: That is the one idea I started with. Everything else changed, but that love story was the starting point for me, and it stayed in the book through all its incarnations. Maybe it represented the hopelessness of what we saw and lived through. Or the seeming hopelessness, and then trying to make sense of it. Anyway, that was the anchor. And I think it was the only one.

 DM: Are the people in Safelight supposed to represent actual people at the station? 

 SB: No.

 DM: But you were working as a medic, working with people we both knew. Were you not incorporating real traits of those guys into the story you were trying to tell?

 SB: Well, it’s a novel.  You invent a character, and then the character starts getting bent around and taking on other qualities, and some of those qualities may be recognizable as coming from people you know, but other qualities are complete invention, and so you get a mixture of all kinds of things from different places. And then these characters end up doing things that nobody you know would ever do, and so what you end up with is pure fiction. And that’s the way I think of it when I’m writing. I think of my characters as characters and nothing else. I mean, I’m not thinking of anyone real. I remember the last edits I made on the book. I had to write more scenes. Maybe it was ten scenes. And it was so easy to write them because by that point I knew all the characters intimately. I knew where they lived, and what they would say, and what they’d been through. So, I’d just sit down and write the scenes without revision. It was a reminder of how much of writing is actually thinking and getting things clear in your head, that the writing part is just the final result. That so much of it is preparation.

 DM: That kind of gets at something else. I know how you write. You outline obsessively. You work out every possibility in your mind before you’re ready to write.

 SB: Yeah, I do. The problem with writing in that spare style is that if there’s any flaw it’s really obvious. Verbosity tends to cover over or wash out structural problems, and even character problems, and so you can get away with some things you couldn’t get away with in a book with a spare style. So I had to think about the structure and the shape of the book a lot before I started. But when I finally got down to writing I didn’t look at the outline. Because I didn’t want to know exactly what was there. I didn’t want to be following it like a connect the dots sort of thing. I just wanted to have a general idea, and then let the thing move forward on its own, but within the confines, hopefully, of what I’d planned out before.  So, it’s a give and take. You have to be constrained to some extent, but you have to leave yourself room for inspiration.

 DM: Were there writers you were inspired by?

 SB: Well, sure. Everyone’s inspired by someone. And anyone that’s minimalist is always said to be inspired by Hemingway. And I don’t deny it. I really admired Hemingway when I was young. And I still admire him. The Sun Also Rises is one of my favorite books. But I don’t think it’s as simple as only being influenced by Hemingway. There’s Knut Hamsun, James Kelman, Coetzee, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Kawabata. A bunch of people. And if you look at all those people, you’ll see they all wrote fairly succinct, emotional stories. Obviously not all of Tolstoy was succinct. Or even Kelman or Hamsun. But they all did write in that spare, emotional style at some point. And that’s what I was drawn to. Oh, and also, all those French books. Remember, I used to read all those French books on the ambulance?

 DM: Yeah. In French.

 SB: Right. Well, around the time I was writing Safelight I was reading Flaubert, Les Miserables, and a bunch of Zola, and I remember learning something from all that, particularly from the Zola. In Zola you have the heroes doing horrible things. It’s like the heroes are raping fourteen year old virgins. And I realized that as long as the situation was bad enough you could have the main character do almost anything and you’d forgive him. You’d just say he was a good person in a bad circumstance. And that lesson was really important for me when I was writing Safelight. It gave me confidence to do what I wanted to, to really show the brutality and also the mundaneness of the job. And the total disaffection of everyone up there.

 DM: Well that disaffected tone is definitely, for me, one of the best parts of the book. Because it’s so real. I mean, what really got to me about the job was just the repetition. And the boredom. And just...the weirdness. You don’t see that on like the TV shows. I mean, the weirdness and the irony just happened on all levels. Like I remember one time I worked on a cardiac arrest in front of a Christmas tree with all the family sitting there, like half the presents unwrapped.

 SB: Do you remember the job that Scott had with the Christmas tree? There were four people in the apartment, and they were doing the candles on the Christmas tree thing. So, the Christmas tree catches on fire and the father tried to be heroic. He grabbed the burning tree to pull it out of the apartment. He made it all the way to the front door, then collapsed out in the hallway. The father ended up living because he was out in the hallway. But everyone else was trapped. The burning tree was blocking the only exit and the fire had spread across the whole apartment. The windows had bars on them. The mother and the two kids died.

 DM: Oh, God. That’s horrible. I had a few like that, where...you just can’t imagine how bad it was. I remember we had one where a girl had drowned, and all the mother seemed to care about was convincing us she’d had nothing to do with it.  The mother kept pulling out this store receipt with the time on it, to prove she wasn’t in the apartment when the daughter died. I swear, she kept showing us this receipt. And we’re all sitting there, doing CPR on her daughter, while she’s holding up this receipt. I’m like, I can’t even tell anyone this story. It’s all too weird. And half the time the other medics didn’t even want to talk about it.

 SB: I know I didn’t. Not the real stuff, anyway.

 DM: Well, that’s exactly the way it is. And getting back to your book, that’s definitely the way your main character was. Would you say Frank was based on yourself? Is he you? Is he a part of you?

 SB: Well, he’s definitely a part of me. It’s hard to say how much. I read somewhere, (I think it was in that John Barth story “Welcome to the Funhouse”), that you should use the first person only if it’s a character not at all resembling you. And I was like, Wow, I definitely broke that rule. Because Frank is like me. I mean, the sort of disaffected attitude. And his reactions to things. I’d say he’s a version of me. Though I never did any of the things Frank did in the book, I’d say I definitely have felt like Frank did. I probably wouldn’t have written the book if I hadn’t. But what do you think? You’re in as good a position as anyone to make a judgment on that?

 DM: Well, I see characteristics that are similar. I mean, particularly that Frank is not someone that’s really big on explanation. If asked, he’ll answer honestly, but he’s not elaborating on his feelings. And that resembles you. But he resembles other people, too. I mean, a lot of people we knew at the station were like Frank. You even stole one of my stories and gave it to him.

 SB: Which one?

 DM: The one where the dog eats the guy’s head.

 SB: Oh, yeah, that is in there. But in the final version I ended up taking out the money shot. I just have the elements. I mean, the dog, the legs of the dead person, and Frank coming in. But we don’t see what he sees. I thought it was gratuitous. So I took it out. I just have him taking the picture.

 DM: Did you ever take pictures yourself? I mean, on the job?

 SB: No. But I know you did. I remember that you did.

 DM: Well, that’s true. I did take pictures for a while. I never got totally into it, though.  At first I thought, Well, I’m here, I’m witnessing it, why not take a picture? Then after a while, it just becomes...common. I mean, how many decomposed bodies do you need to see? Blown up cow heads and engorged tongues and the flies. After a while You’re like, Yeah, all right, that’s what it looks like...But you never did it?

 SB: No.

 DM:  But you chose that as a trait of your main character. Did you do that because you knew that by him taking pictures it would be a window into Frank, who wasn’t exactly tipping his hand emotionally?

 SB: Definitely. It was for that specific reason. And I don’t want to say it’s contrived. Because I like the way it turned out. But I knew exactly why I was putting that in when I did it. The book is very unusual for a first person narrative in that there is almost no interior monologue, and the pictures sort of took the place of that. I knew they were going to serve as a window, as you say, into Frank’s emotional life. And if you look at Frank’s pictures of Emily, they present a very distinct progression, from him saying he won’t take a picture of her, to taking a shot of her when she’s fencing and she has her mask on, to taking a picture of her from far away out near the abandoned warehouse, and then, near the end, with Hock cajoling him to do it, he finally takes the portrait. And you remember there’s one more photograph at the very end. He just takes a picture of her eyes. And so the whole thing is a really careful, step by step progression, Frank getting closer and closer to her. And I think the reader feels that progression, whether or not he’s aware of it consciously.

 DM: Did anyone in your family make it into the book? Like, does your relationship with your wife have anything to do with Emily?

 SB: Almost nothing. I mean, Amy doesn’t have HIV. And it’s just...not like us. Remember, I’d started writing the book before I met Amy, and by the time I really knew Amy, the character of Emily was pretty solidified. I remember the first time Amy came over to my apartment, there was a draft of the book on the windowsill. She’s really critical about literature, and apparently she peeked at the first page when I wasn’t in the room. Later on she said she was relieved because she’d decided I was a good writer, and if I wasn’t, she knew it wouldn’t work out between us.

 DM: Nice.

 SB: Yeah, romance.

 DM: So. One last question. Though maybe this should have been the first question. Safelight. The title. What were you thinking?

 SB: It’s the light that doesn’t expose the film in the dark room. It’s the place where Frank can look at this gruesome stuff without it having any effect. You know, he has this memory of his father, he doesn’t want to think about it or talk about it, but he goes into this dark room, turns on the red light, and he can sort of experience it without having it totally overwhelm him. It’s the safe representation, the echo, of what he felt. It’s the first step toward him dealing with it. I think that was my idea. But remember, the original title was The Dark Room. It was that for a long time. And it was a long time before I decided that Safelight was the right title.

 DM: Safelight’s infinitely better. To me it makes ten times more sense on every level. The Dark Room is a bit bleak, which is exactly what you don’t want. That’s where you start, but that’s not where you finish, and that’s not what the book is about.

 SB: Well, I hope that’s true.

 DM: Looking back, and now that it’s done, out of your hands, the errors are there, you can’t fix it, can’t change it, it’s out there for all of mankind to peruse for eternity, are there things about it you’d change or that you’re not satisfied with?

 SB: There are definitely lines that I think could have been better written. There are places where I used the same word twice on the same page. There are one or two scenes that I might have taken out. But in general I’m happy with the book, though I do wish I was a better writer when I wrote it.

 DM: Oh, come on, man.

 SB: But I’m not saying I’m displeased. I feel good about the book. I think it says what I wanted it to say. I’m proud of it.

 DM: Well, you should be. You captured the emotional nature of the job better than anything else I’ve ever seen written. I mean, what people like us went through, and how people really reacted.

 SB: Rather than perpetuating the myth?

 DM: Yeah, exactly. Catch the baby from the burning window. That sort of bullshit. For me, the book captures exactly what it’s like to work as an EMT in a place like New York. It’s not something I’ve seen anywhere else.