I.M. Aiken is the author of the new novel The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County. Aiken lives in Vermont.
Q: What inspired you to write
The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, and how did you create your
character Alex?
A: Although fiction, The
Little Ambulance War came from experiences. I have been involved in public
safety and government service since the age of 20. When starting, my target was
something else and something more familiar, like a Tuesday night in front of
the television with strong jawed characters in a dark city. That’s not the
story, I had to tell myself after a draft (or two).
What does this life have to do
with body and soul? That’s the question I had to address.
Like my Alex, I found myself
at the age of 28 paralyzed with fear, anxiety, and pain on a trafficked road in
Milwaukee confused by brake lights, traffic lights, street signs, and noise. In
the novel, I put Alex in Rome.
I had to ask what happens to
people who run towards danger, fire, brutality, crisis, and other people’s
heartache. During my years as a paid and volunteer first responder, I struggled
with the parochial feuds that developed between neighboring agencies.
Why do people with similar
experience, background, needs, and dedication fight with each other on a
critical scene? Even in the big cities, there are reports of firefighters
pulling hoses through cop cars and physical dust-ups between human beings.
Alex is an insider and an
outsider at the same moment, a narrative I represented with the “us” versus “them”
dance heard throughout the story. Is Alex one of us? Or something/someone else?
That’s a pretty universal
feeling, isn’t it? We never lose that existential loneliness and doubt-filled
image of ourselves that we faced in high school. Each of us has heard the words
and felt the impact of other human beings who offer hatred and barriers.
Added to this is yet another
shared experience of the veteran returning from foreign wars.
My friend, a shepherd (plus
firefighter, farmer, EMT, constable, father) still feels the shame and shunning
offered to him on his return from Vietnam. As he approached 75 years of age, he
had been diagnosed with a complex suite of medical suite attributed to Agent
Orange.
And I have an entirely
different experience returning from the battlefields of Iraq in my desert kit.
It was late 2006 and I had been released after 330 days in-country. Silence.
Utter and complete silence, except for the lovely officer at a security checkpoint
in London who did me a solid so that I didn’t spent hours in legal purgatory.
Let’s admit, I was likely to
trip a sensor that tests for chemicals on clothing and luggage. I had my U.S.
government ID and my paper orders. I don’t think the security camera saw him
fold the round white disk out of the way. Thanks for the one kindness on a
brutal trip. Most others looked at their shoes.
What does a hero, a veteran,
an EMT, cop, firefight feel after a lifetime of service? That became my
question.
Q: How did your own
experiences working on ambulances affect the writing of the novel, and did you
need to do any additional research?
A: The philosopher once said:
“Write what you know.” I remember the night that I came home from high school
asking if I could sign up for one course at Northeastern University. During the
spring term of my senior year, I drove my poo-brown Datsun B210 to a classroom
and learned how to identify and treat illnesses and injuries. That decision has
informed my entire life and opened many opportunities.
As an EMT, or cop, or
firefighter, you are the being invited into the living rooms, bedrooms,
basements, bathrooms, and cars of people everywhere. You walk into the lives of
people on their worst days.
During the first days, every
experience is novel and exciting and memorable and life changing. Decades
later, all calls, all patients, all scene blend into a dateless, timeless,
non-linear series of images and memories. I tried to represent this experience
within the novel as well.
As for research? Kinda no,
kinda yes. I thought that I would be clever and put my Alex Flynn in a world
created by my father, a novelist. My research involved reading my father’s 1977
book.
Two things happened. First I
recognized that my protagonist and his were entirely different. And two, I
liked mine better. I addressed the issue by changing ages, names, and ranks.
Let the reader figure it out!
Q: Did you know how the novel
would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the
way?
A: Which draft?
I certainly think that when I
start a novel, I know exactly where it is going. There is this point in a story
that feels like the “stall” when barbecuing a beef brisket. Am I right? Is this
ever going right? Will this be ok? Sometimes, you finish and call it a flop.
Sometimes, I have given up before writing “the end” on the last page.
I have learned to inventory
the best of the characters, the best scenes, the best emotions and re-assess my
goals. That becomes another draft. When I turned my forthcoming novel Stolen
Mountain (2025, Flare Books) over to Catalyst Press this summer, I saw that I
had written six complete drafts and changed the name four times. Yet somehow it
is the same book?
Q: What do you hope readers
take away from the book?
A: I am the 9-11 generation.
I was born the year after JFK promised us the moon and I sat cross-legged in a
classroom watching men walk on the lunar surface via a grainy black-and-white
television. My generation has lived through drugs, AIDS, domestic terrorism,
international terrorism, all before we stared COVID in the face.
I think I want people to
accept that democracy is ours, all of ours. I did not agree with the policies
that sent America into Iraq, yet I served a year in Iraq as a civilian member
of a military unit lending my technical expertise to a critical mission.
Democracy requires that we
accept each other as human beings worthy of respect, love, and even reverence.
There is enough tragedy, drama, trauma, and blood without thinking that we need
to spill the blood more to force a change of thought, a change of personality,
a change of character.
Let’s tear down the nonsense
of “us and them.” We’re all the “us” we need. We cannot have policies and laws
that separate us into neat buckets of this and that. We’re human. We’re messy,
noisy, needy, loving, odd animals that need relatively little to muddle through
our days: oxygen, glucose, essential minerals, a place to sit and a place to
sleep. We like someone to love us and cherish us, while reciprocating that
love.
I have seen true evil. I have
been to horrific crime scenes, and I spent a year working in and around combat
operations. Our battlefield was a recycled battlefield from prior wars. We
don’t need to manufacture ugliness on purpose. It finds us.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: As mentioned above, the
2025 novel is called Stolen Mountain and involves two characters we met in The
Little Ambulance War. The 2026 novel Captain Henry is undergoing a significant
rewrite and redesign. There is another novel in the cauldron simmering over the
fire.
In The Little Ambulance War
of Winchester County, I introduced readers to Trowbridge, Vermont, and the
community of first responders.
Instead of taking a “vertical”
perspective on one character as one might find with picaresque novel, I thought
I would look through the plane of characters within the community to and write
something that is more “horizontal,” while remaining rooted in Trowbridge and
the people there.
In Stolen Mountain, you can
enjoy 100,000 words about Brighid Doran, EMT, and Sarah Ann Musgrave, soldier.
Captain Henry may yet fail,
who knows, I shall keep working it. On one hand, I have Bridget researching her
own ancestry.
She discovers a lost American
hero in her great-great-great grandfather who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1865
and then got deployed to the Reconstruction South where he did battle with the
KKK, gun runners, moonshiners, and others before being deployed further west.
I have the written orders
from the Army to one of my own ancestors, who was this guy, Captain Henry. He
was a private, then a sergeant. As Brighid tells the story of her ancestor, she
reads her wife’s letters from the Iraq battlefield in 2006.
It feels hard to write about
American history at this moment. Nearly every topic in this novel feels taboo.
In the meantime, I am
sketching a series of new characters in Trowbridge wondering what stories they
have to tell me and the rest of us.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: In late May, a bookstore
opened in Somerville, Massachusetts, called “Narrative.” The owner is Mila
Hossain. On her opening day, the lines stretched down Highland Avenue with
people wanting to buy books. At the end of the day, she had sold almost her
entire inventory. Would she be able to open on Day #2?
The bookstore that is hosting
the pre-orders for The Little Ambulance War is called Northshire Books in
Manchester, Vermont. I can’t walk though that place without bumping shoulders
with people of every age. People reach for, touch, smell, and read everything
in the store.
For someone with books
spanning a century in her living room and someone raised by a family of artists
and writers, this uptick of activity around books brings me joy and hope.
Even me, a self-identified
geek, recently bought an AM/FM radio with a CD player. No matter how hard I
tried I could not get streaming to feel like, behave like, and solve problems
the way that owning my own media does.
When I buy something, I want
to know that (1) I own it now and forever (2) the artist is compensated for
their efforts and ownership of their intellectual property.
I have signed first editions.
Rare books, lovely normal books by lovely everyday writers. My shelves show me
a 20-year gap. Oh, I bought books, movies, and music, but I don’t own them and
they don’t sit on my shelves.
Buy books. Buy music. Go to
live concerts. Buy art from that guy on the street corner. Put a tenner in the
hat of the team dancing in the park. Celebrate the young violinist sitting at
the subway platform.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
