May 8th, 2008
Burning Down the House - Web exclusive!
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Hot damn
Melora Koepke
Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, by Russell Wangersky (Thomas Allen), 271 pp.
Ex-firefighter Russell Wangersky mines the glowing embers of his mind and produces an affecting tale
Russell Wangersky's memoir, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, is a book that would not be written by most firefighters. There are taboos about talking about what you see, with your brothers or your families, let alone a reading public. You cannot talk about what nobody talks about, especially the nagging uncertainty about whether you even helped, or what it means to help, or whether there is any help to give. Nobody is supposed to remember things this well, the fires and accident scenes and injuries and deaths they've seen over the course of their years as a volunteer firefighter. But of course - and this is the first secret that Wangersky reveals - they do. At least Wangersky does, in searing, clear, torturous detail. One suspects his ultra-precise writer's eye for surveying detail and analyzing situations contributed to his skill as a firefighter (he was twice voted Firefighter of the Year by the brotherhood) as well as to the post-traumatic stress syndrome that finally dismantled his self, his sanity and his ability to live his own day-to-day life.
Wangersky, the editor-in-chief of the St-John's Telegram who began volunteer firefighting in the Maritimes as a 20-year-old with an honours degree in philosophy, relates, with patient precision, what it's like to be the first on the scene for countless unimaginable human tragedies, and for these kinds of events to be exactly the opposite of "unimaginable." They are in fact ever present in Wangersky's imagination; his waking hours and sleep have both been constantly interrupted by hallucinations and nightmares of accidents, injuries and deaths unfolding again and again.
His renderings of long-ago events are carved into the page so sharply and baroquely that readers will almost see them as he does, and as though they had also been there. Wangersky's first book, a collection of short stories entitled The Hour of Bad Decisions, was long-listed for the Giller and Commonwealth Writers' Prizes, and here he is describing his own life. The images are so well rendered, in fact, that the prose might call attention to itself, if it was something else that was being written about. But the fact is that Wangersky has such a story to tell us that the tightly controlled, occasionally extravagant writing only serves to send the point home.
Certainly, there is material here for readers curious about what fire can do to a house, or a person trapped inside, or about the mechanics of removing someone's twisted limbs from a car or a piece of farm equipment. But Wangersky has created a strange, effective structure for his memories. In chapters about various scenes, fires and victims he has seen, has helped or not helped, he is mapping the landscape of his own mind, looking for a way through.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Back from the road...
Just back from Burlington, Ontario, and the Different Drummer bookstore's reading series. It boasts that it's Canada's longest-running reading series, and it sure knows how to do thing right. Nine o'clock on a sunny spring morning, and 220 people show up to hear three authors read. It is an amazing event, and an amazing bookstore. If you're ever in Burlington, take the time to see an independent bookstore that really knows its stuff.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Another story...
This one's from the Kentville Advertiser - and what I love about it is that the reporter went back and talked to some of the firefighters I worked with in Wolfville.
BY WENDY ELLIOTT
welliott@kentvilleadvertiser.ca
NovaNewsNow.com
Many young boys dream of becoming a firefighter. However, for Russell Wangersky, it wasn’t long before his dream job turned into a nightmare.
Burning Down the House is the true story of this critically acclaimed author’s eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter.
Wangersky was an Acadia University student working in the periodicals section of the Vaughan Library when he applied to join the Wolfville Volunteer Fire Department. It was 1983.
He and Wolfville native David Hennessey were young and enthusiastic recruits. Under the tutelage of veterans like Gerald Wood, Tim MacLeod and Harold Stewart, Wangersky learned the ropes.
He saw his first dead body after an accident in Gaspereau and, almost surprisingly, he became hooked on the fire service. About 18 months later, Wangersky left Wolfville to pursue work in Ontario. He served later as a firefighter outside St. John’s, Newfoundland and reached the rank of deputy chief.
Burning Down the House offers a unique insider’s vision of the often dangerous world of firefighting. It’s a heartfelt memoir about the emotional and psychological toll firefighting took on Wangersky’s personal life, including his marriage, family and, ultimately, his mind.
Written in a visceral literary prose, Wangersky takes readers with him on a harrowing journey of car accidents, house fires and medical calls. Building a map of traumatic memories — from performing CPR on a colleague’s father to close calls in house fires and an almost fatal fuel explosion — Wangersky reveals the secrets of firefighting that many emergency workers never let themselves admit.
He still suffers night terrors when he wakes up reliving first responder situations.
Haunted by pieces of experience
Bob Cook, who is the mechanic on staff at the Wolfville station, can relate. He says most volunteers are haunted by pieces of their experience. For him, it was a collision involving a girl about the same age as his daughters.
Today, Cook says those in the fire service are better at recognizing when their peers need help. “People aren’t smoke-eaters anymore. They don’t have to be big heroes. If they withdraw and change character, we know they need help.”
Tim MacLeod, who is now Wolfville’s fire chief, remembers Wangersky and that accident in Gaspereau. He has read Burning Down the House and compliments the author, saying, “it’s a good read.”
MacLeod says firefighters compartmentalize the trauma they experience in different ways. Since the early ‘80s, Critical Incident Stress Debriefings have been instituted so the mental health of members can be maintained.
According to MacLeod, all firefighters will recognize the adrenalin rush Wangersky describes so well. He adds that most go on auto pilot when actually firefighting.
“It’s afterward that you replay it,” he says. “Collisions are hard to swallow. You have to be heartless. There aren’t a lot of breaks in the fire service.”
MacLeod notes that the department Wangersky went to in Newfoundland was about half the size of Wolfville’s, but “you can see a lot of shit in eight years,” he says of his career fighting fires.
The fire chief remembers the author as an atypical recruit in the sense of size. “He was a little guy.” He says his department trains about six or seven recruits each year.
“We’ve had some really good students. They get better training now,” notes MacLeod. “One went on to be fire chief in Niagara-on-the-Lake.”
The managing editor of the Telegram in St. John’s, Wangersky is also a writer whose first collection of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was longlisted for a Giller Award. Burning Down the House sells for $32.95.
BY WENDY ELLIOTT
welliott@kentvilleadvertiser.ca
NovaNewsNow.com
Many young boys dream of becoming a firefighter. However, for Russell Wangersky, it wasn’t long before his dream job turned into a nightmare.
Burning Down the House is the true story of this critically acclaimed author’s eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter.
Wangersky was an Acadia University student working in the periodicals section of the Vaughan Library when he applied to join the Wolfville Volunteer Fire Department. It was 1983.
He and Wolfville native David Hennessey were young and enthusiastic recruits. Under the tutelage of veterans like Gerald Wood, Tim MacLeod and Harold Stewart, Wangersky learned the ropes.
He saw his first dead body after an accident in Gaspereau and, almost surprisingly, he became hooked on the fire service. About 18 months later, Wangersky left Wolfville to pursue work in Ontario. He served later as a firefighter outside St. John’s, Newfoundland and reached the rank of deputy chief.
Burning Down the House offers a unique insider’s vision of the often dangerous world of firefighting. It’s a heartfelt memoir about the emotional and psychological toll firefighting took on Wangersky’s personal life, including his marriage, family and, ultimately, his mind.
Written in a visceral literary prose, Wangersky takes readers with him on a harrowing journey of car accidents, house fires and medical calls. Building a map of traumatic memories — from performing CPR on a colleague’s father to close calls in house fires and an almost fatal fuel explosion — Wangersky reveals the secrets of firefighting that many emergency workers never let themselves admit.
He still suffers night terrors when he wakes up reliving first responder situations.
Haunted by pieces of experience
Bob Cook, who is the mechanic on staff at the Wolfville station, can relate. He says most volunteers are haunted by pieces of their experience. For him, it was a collision involving a girl about the same age as his daughters.
Today, Cook says those in the fire service are better at recognizing when their peers need help. “People aren’t smoke-eaters anymore. They don’t have to be big heroes. If they withdraw and change character, we know they need help.”
Tim MacLeod, who is now Wolfville’s fire chief, remembers Wangersky and that accident in Gaspereau. He has read Burning Down the House and compliments the author, saying, “it’s a good read.”
MacLeod says firefighters compartmentalize the trauma they experience in different ways. Since the early ‘80s, Critical Incident Stress Debriefings have been instituted so the mental health of members can be maintained.
According to MacLeod, all firefighters will recognize the adrenalin rush Wangersky describes so well. He adds that most go on auto pilot when actually firefighting.
“It’s afterward that you replay it,” he says. “Collisions are hard to swallow. You have to be heartless. There aren’t a lot of breaks in the fire service.”
MacLeod notes that the department Wangersky went to in Newfoundland was about half the size of Wolfville’s, but “you can see a lot of shit in eight years,” he says of his career fighting fires.
The fire chief remembers the author as an atypical recruit in the sense of size. “He was a little guy.” He says his department trains about six or seven recruits each year.
“We’ve had some really good students. They get better training now,” notes MacLeod. “One went on to be fire chief in Niagara-on-the-Lake.”
The managing editor of the Telegram in St. John’s, Wangersky is also a writer whose first collection of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was longlisted for a Giller Award. Burning Down the House sells for $32.95.
Globe and Mail Review
LAWRENCE SCANLAN
May 10, 2008
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Fighting Fires and Losing Myself
By Russell Wangersky
Thomas Allen, 271 pages, $32.95
Print Edition - Section Front
The Globe and Mail
I now know that "a thin, sugary smell reminiscent of caramel" may sometimes presage a hay fire. That the heavy protein foam used by firefighters smells "for all the world like hot dogs." That "10-45" on a police scanner is code for the discovery of a dead body and "Code-4 medical" is shorthand for a patient just moments away from perishing. That in a house fire, paint blisters fast and then "the bubbles crust over black" before splitting. I now know that whether you live or die in a gas explosion sometimes comes down to "bare-naked chance": whether you happen to be inhaling or exhaling at the moment of "whoof."
I know all this thanks to Russell Wangersky and his remarkable, almost Proustian book, Burning Down the House. Now the editor of the Telegram in St. John's, he served for eight years as a volunteer firefighter in two locales: the Annapolis Valley town of Wolfville, in Nova Scotia, and Portugal Cove-St. Philip's, on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.
The book is a record of what he saw and heard, smelled, felt and thought while responding to emergency calls. "Suffering" is not too strong a word to describe the impact of that experience on him, and I imagine that the act of putting it all down on paper (relying, it seems, on a photographic memory) provoked yet more suffering. By his own admission, his family suffered. Out of that apparently shattering experience has come this astonishingly visceral piece of writing.
Here is Wangersky on the sounds of one fire: "A hardware store was the first occasion I ever heard spray paint cans exploding, a bright, sharp crack of overheated metal, and then the deeper whumps as gallons of house paint blew their lids all along a shelving unit. It was a kaleidoscope of sound, that fire - the explosions, the crackling wood, the body slam of the plate glass front window suddenly reaching its thermal limit and blowing out all over the parking lot in great, long, reaching shards."
Fighting fires and rushing to accidents, he writes, is "a sensory wonder." Indeed. Burning Down the House is so graphic that the book's preface features a warning to that effect.
The reader is spared no detail. And yet I never found myself being repulsed by the images. I was more inclined to admire the hand that crafted them. Broken ribs cause Wangersky to ruminate on "the tinker-toy construction of the chest." Staunching the flow of blood made him feel "like I was mucking around in ochre soup, trying to find a cut artery like it's some sort of live and spraying rubbery noodle." When chickens catch fire in a barn blaze, they run - "small, angry meteors rushing along the ground in straight and urgent lines."
The author makes it perfectly clear that many others who serve as volunteer firefighters in this country's small and rural places are able to park their sensitivities, to get the job done and move on - without obsession, without nightmares, without anguish and tears. He could not. Wangersky got hooked, well and truly addicted, to the rush of adrenalin.
Burning Down the House is such a raw book, one that lays bare both terrible moments in time and the author's own unravelling. Over and over, he breaks down a blaze or a crash, probing its anatomy, its beginning and its end. This is a cautionary tale, one you might want to give to a teenager newly licensed to drive, or to a man who thinks he drives better with a few beers under his belt, or a woman who has removed the batteries from the smoke detector because it goes off when she fries bacon. I was left with a powerful sense of just how fragile the human body is, how vulnerable to tons of metal and rubber moving along at 120 kilometres an hour, how sometimes nefarious in nature is the "red devil" called fire.
Accidents portrayed on film and television somehow seem neater, certainly quieter. Crash victims don't scream all the while they're being rescued, but some do in this book. If I thought "the jaws of life" always get that trapped driver out quickly, I don't think that any more.
I would have wished for even more from the author on the actual physics of fire, while the material on his personal torments (the doubting, self-loathing and self-absorption) was almost too much to bear. But when Wangersky is rushing to the scene of a house in flames or to carnage on a dark county road, he is an all-senses-charged witness with an unerring eye for detail. In this haunting meditation on fate and chance, he literally takes you there.
His first collection of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was long-listed in 2006 for the Giller Prize and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Mark down the name. He's a comer.
Starting out
"Starting out in Wolfville, I had my mitts, a two-dollar throwaway flashlight -- the first one I bought was white, but there would be many more -- an aluminum hose tool for tightening connections, and eight feet of lightweight yellow nylon rope, coiled tightly and tied around itself. And helmet number nine--that was the number I signed out on everything. ...
I was in locker number nine, an open-front wooden locker in a row of real firefighters, all the other gear on either side of me, all of it belonging to the kind of guys who ran into burning houses while their owners were running out. ... They all looked bigger than real life to me, every one of them, all huge and serious and professional, incapable of either fear or doubt. Guys who knew what to do, always."
From Burning Down the House
Lawrence Scanlan lived in a small place - a village in Southeastern Ontario called Camden East - for 17 years. He is researching a book on volunteers and philanthropists.
May 10, 2008
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Fighting Fires and Losing Myself
By Russell Wangersky
Thomas Allen, 271 pages, $32.95
Print Edition - Section Front
The Globe and Mail
I now know that "a thin, sugary smell reminiscent of caramel" may sometimes presage a hay fire. That the heavy protein foam used by firefighters smells "for all the world like hot dogs." That "10-45" on a police scanner is code for the discovery of a dead body and "Code-4 medical" is shorthand for a patient just moments away from perishing. That in a house fire, paint blisters fast and then "the bubbles crust over black" before splitting. I now know that whether you live or die in a gas explosion sometimes comes down to "bare-naked chance": whether you happen to be inhaling or exhaling at the moment of "whoof."
I know all this thanks to Russell Wangersky and his remarkable, almost Proustian book, Burning Down the House. Now the editor of the Telegram in St. John's, he served for eight years as a volunteer firefighter in two locales: the Annapolis Valley town of Wolfville, in Nova Scotia, and Portugal Cove-St. Philip's, on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.
The book is a record of what he saw and heard, smelled, felt and thought while responding to emergency calls. "Suffering" is not too strong a word to describe the impact of that experience on him, and I imagine that the act of putting it all down on paper (relying, it seems, on a photographic memory) provoked yet more suffering. By his own admission, his family suffered. Out of that apparently shattering experience has come this astonishingly visceral piece of writing.
Here is Wangersky on the sounds of one fire: "A hardware store was the first occasion I ever heard spray paint cans exploding, a bright, sharp crack of overheated metal, and then the deeper whumps as gallons of house paint blew their lids all along a shelving unit. It was a kaleidoscope of sound, that fire - the explosions, the crackling wood, the body slam of the plate glass front window suddenly reaching its thermal limit and blowing out all over the parking lot in great, long, reaching shards."
Fighting fires and rushing to accidents, he writes, is "a sensory wonder." Indeed. Burning Down the House is so graphic that the book's preface features a warning to that effect.
The reader is spared no detail. And yet I never found myself being repulsed by the images. I was more inclined to admire the hand that crafted them. Broken ribs cause Wangersky to ruminate on "the tinker-toy construction of the chest." Staunching the flow of blood made him feel "like I was mucking around in ochre soup, trying to find a cut artery like it's some sort of live and spraying rubbery noodle." When chickens catch fire in a barn blaze, they run - "small, angry meteors rushing along the ground in straight and urgent lines."
The author makes it perfectly clear that many others who serve as volunteer firefighters in this country's small and rural places are able to park their sensitivities, to get the job done and move on - without obsession, without nightmares, without anguish and tears. He could not. Wangersky got hooked, well and truly addicted, to the rush of adrenalin.
Burning Down the House is such a raw book, one that lays bare both terrible moments in time and the author's own unravelling. Over and over, he breaks down a blaze or a crash, probing its anatomy, its beginning and its end. This is a cautionary tale, one you might want to give to a teenager newly licensed to drive, or to a man who thinks he drives better with a few beers under his belt, or a woman who has removed the batteries from the smoke detector because it goes off when she fries bacon. I was left with a powerful sense of just how fragile the human body is, how vulnerable to tons of metal and rubber moving along at 120 kilometres an hour, how sometimes nefarious in nature is the "red devil" called fire.
Accidents portrayed on film and television somehow seem neater, certainly quieter. Crash victims don't scream all the while they're being rescued, but some do in this book. If I thought "the jaws of life" always get that trapped driver out quickly, I don't think that any more.
I would have wished for even more from the author on the actual physics of fire, while the material on his personal torments (the doubting, self-loathing and self-absorption) was almost too much to bear. But when Wangersky is rushing to the scene of a house in flames or to carnage on a dark county road, he is an all-senses-charged witness with an unerring eye for detail. In this haunting meditation on fate and chance, he literally takes you there.
His first collection of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was long-listed in 2006 for the Giller Prize and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Mark down the name. He's a comer.
Starting out
"Starting out in Wolfville, I had my mitts, a two-dollar throwaway flashlight -- the first one I bought was white, but there would be many more -- an aluminum hose tool for tightening connections, and eight feet of lightweight yellow nylon rope, coiled tightly and tied around itself. And helmet number nine--that was the number I signed out on everything. ...
I was in locker number nine, an open-front wooden locker in a row of real firefighters, all the other gear on either side of me, all of it belonging to the kind of guys who ran into burning houses while their owners were running out. ... They all looked bigger than real life to me, every one of them, all huge and serious and professional, incapable of either fear or doubt. Guys who knew what to do, always."
From Burning Down the House
Lawrence Scanlan lived in a small place - a village in Southeastern Ontario called Camden East - for 17 years. He is researching a book on volunteers and philanthropists.
Long time, no post
Just over a week ago, I heard from a former Vancouver 911 operator, someone who outlined the same types of problems I ran into. I've heard from a volunteer firefighter in Quebec who quit after first watching someone burn to death after being pinned in a crashed pickup truck, and then seeing the victims of a plane crash. He spent six months in his department. Both of them have trouble shaking what they've had to deal with. I'm beginning to wonder about the wisdom of continuing to read and reread parts of my book. Today, I head to Burlington to read at Different Drummer, and I'm still at sea about what I'm going to read. When I've read - and during some interviews - I've gotten choked up and close to tears. There is no safe ground in the book, and every place I go, I hear that there are plenty of people facing the same sorts of things. Several people have told me that they think the book serves a valuable service - I hope so. I hope it doesn't keep anyone from joining a department, but I hope it lets them see the possibilities. Oh, and the Globe and Mail's reviewer really liked the book. I might well pinch the review and post it here.
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