Interview by John Newlin
Fire is Your Water, Jim Minick’s first novel, is a compelling story of love, faith,
forgiveness, and compassion, related from several points of view. Set in the farmland of central Pennsylvania
near the end of the Korean War, the author explores, among many things, family,
man and nature, the Biblical gift of healing, and what it means to love
unconditionally.
Jim Minick is the author of
five books, including The Blueberry Years,
winner of the best Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Southern Independent
Booksellers Association. He teaches at
Augusta University and in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.
Questions:
JN: Jim, this novel reflects many aspects of your
childhood. Was it always going to be a
novel, or did you originally envision it as a memoir of your childhood?
JM: It started out as
nonfiction. In 1983, I was burned in an explosion similar to the one that
happens later in Fire Is Your Water. I
wrote a creative nonfiction piece about that, published in Now and Then Magazine (Summer 2002) titled “Flash Burn.” Though I
tried, I couldn’t figure out how to make a larger book about that time and
place, when I worked pumping gas on the PA Turnpike. And I also had these other
family stories about this place and another fire, stories from before I was
born, and so it took me at least four or five years of wandering in the
wilderness of words to figure out that, hey, fiction would allow me to combine
these stories IF I could figure out how.
Part of that “how” was
connecting these stories by collapsing four generations of people into two generations,
and thirty years of stories condensed to three months. The larger part of the
“how,” though, was figuring out the connecting thread, which eventually I found
to be what happens to a faith healer when she loses her faith and her ability
to heal. That became the driving question.
JN: Have you ever met or known a person who possessed
the gift of healing?
JM: Ada Franklin, the main
character in Fire Is Your Water, is
based on my great-grandmother, Ida Franklin Minick, who was a powwow doctor in
the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition. She could remove warts, stop blood, and take
out fire, like Ada in the novel. And she did enter a burning barn with her
daughter-in-law, who was severely burned in the process. And after, Ida was not the one who healed my grandmother’s
hands—another relative did. So that got me thinking about why and what happens
if faith is lost. I’m pretty sure that did not happen with Ida, but it opened a
door for me.
Some other family stories
about Ida—like of healing a bleeding cow by saying the chant through the
phone—I was able to use in the novel as well. Ida died when I was four. My
first memory is of sitting on her lap. So, to answer your question, I wish I
had known her better, and in a way, this novel helped me imagine a little of
her life.
JN: You spent fifteen years working on this
novel. Did you at any time “give up” on
the project? If so, what do you see as
having impelled you to finish it?
JM: “Set aside” is a better
phrase than “give up.” Attention got pulled to other projects, so in that
fifteen years, I wrote my other four books, plus taught full-time. At some
deeper level, I think I knew I wasn’t ready yet to write this book, so I had to
learn my way in, through other genres first, and then through extensive reading
and studying of novels I admired, like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Tea Obreht’s The
Tiger’s Wife, and Cormac McCarthy’s No
Country for Old Men.
JN: I love the way you weave the character of Cicero,
the raven, into this love story. It adds
a wonderful dimension to the novel. When
you first conceived the idea for the book, was this perspective something you
had in mind, or did that idea come along later on? Oh, and can ravens be taught to talk???
JM: Cicero and the idea of a
talking bird came much later, maybe two-thirds of the way into writing this. I
was taking a fiction writing workshop with Darnell Arnoult (an excellent
teacher and writer), and I knew the other main character, Will, loved birds, so
I kept playing with that idea, trying to figure out how to develop that passion
of his. Then I remembered reading an essay, also in Now and Then, about a person growing up with a talking crow as a
pet, and that, along with Darnell’s encouragement to just experiment, let me
walk through that door of magic realism to find Cicero there waiting to chew my
ear off, literally.
And yes, many birds,
especially “smarter” species like ravens and crows, can learn words. I
collected several funny stories from fellow birders about such. One ornithology
professor told of a raven a friend of his tamed in grad school. The bird loved
to say, “Nevermore,” AND he loved to drink. When he got too tipsy, he’d just
repeat, “Never, never, never….”
When Cicero heard this, he
wanted to file an animal abuse report until he realized that this happened
decades ago.
JN: One of the themes that struck me about the novel
was the hint of loneliness, that of Ada and Will, two characters whose lives
appear for much of the novel to be heading away from lifetime
relationships. It’s a topic that you
addressed at length in The Blueberry
Years. As writer, farmer, and
homesteader, your life clearly involved working in isolation for great
periods. How do you deal with that
aspect of your life?
JM: The older I get, the more
curmudgeonly I get. And in this society of
hyper-social-media-over-connectedness, it’s not easy to find real, meaningful
friendships. But it’s necessary to remember the difference between loneliness
and solitude.
Writing itself is a solitary
endeavor, and so, it’s important to enjoy and embrace that solitude, and to
understand how it differs from loneliness. Almost always, I’m lonelier in
crowds or cities than in the woods. Thankfully, I’m married to my best friend
and I’ve found some great community through writing and teaching. And doubly
thankfully we have access to the great antidotes to loneliness in just getting
out in the company of trees and birds. I cannot imagine a world without trees
and birds (and bass and beavers and bats and beetles). That might be the ultimate
and saddest form of loneliness.
JN: Having written your first novel, do you see
yourself as gravitating to writing more fiction?
JM: My current project is
nonfiction. After that, yes, I have at least two ideas I want to pursue/have
started, both fiction.
JN: I know you’ve been researching how a community was
ravaged by a tornado in the 1950s. Have
you ever considered using that research as the basis of another novel instead
of a nonfiction account of that devastating event? Or maybe both?
JM: Yes, early on, I
considered making this current project about a devastating tornado into a
novel—it’d be a whole lot easier, that’s for sure. But I’ve collected many hours of conversations/interviews
with survivors of this tornado, and the more I listened and worked with their
stories, the more I realize that the best way to honor them and their stories
is through nonfiction. That genre, for me, at least, somehow best captures
their story.
JN: Any final lessons or surprises from writing Fire Is Your Water?
JM: Faith comes in many
shapes. Doubt too. Respect—even embrace—that. And listen to the birds.
Or as Eubie Blake said: “Be
grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't
hate nobody.”
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ABOUT JOHN NEWLIN
John Newlin’s work has been
published in Short Story America, Independent School Magazine, South85 Journal, and Night Owl Journal. He is the Review Editor for South85.
