Medic Up! Episode #12 Joe Connelly: Author of Bringing Out The Dead Pt. 1

Joe Connelly Bio

He was born in St Clare’s Hospital in Hells Kitchen

Manhattan, the same hospital his mother worked for, and went to nursing school

at, and where his parents met, at a dance in the basement. He grew up in

Queens, and then upstate in Orange County. After 12 years of Catholic school he

finished third in his class, and won a full scholarship to Colgate University.

He was the first person in his family to go to college, and three years later,

became the first to drop out. He traveled around the country, different jobs in

different places. He was tending bar in Dublin when he read a book called The

Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham, about an ambulance driver in World War I. He

decided then to go back to New York City, and join EMS. He wanted to help

people, make a difference, but more important than that, he wanted to see those

big ideas of life and death he figured every writer needed to understand.

He worked up in Harlem first. The system was overwhelmed

then, ambulances broken, angry and overworked labor, patients waiting hours for

help. In 1987 everyone got a medal just for coming to work. During one

organized sickout he went looking for a job somewhere else, and found it with

the same hospital he was born at, driving an ambulance in the old Times Square,

the Deuce.

He started writing the stories he was seeing, in the first

person, but there was another side of him, the paramedic side, that was doing

everything he could to wall those scenes off. It was the height of the AIDS

epidemic, the Crack epidemic. There were 2000 homicides in NYC in 1992, and he was

driving to someone shot almost every night.

He began taking writing classes at Columbia, and gradually

the book took form. In writing about a fictional character, Frank Pierce, a man

with no walls, no defenses, he was finally able to get back to the dark places

he’d walled himself off from. One of his teachers, Colin Harrison, the editor

of Harper’s, got him an agent. One of his classmates, Jenny Minton, was Sonny

Mehta’s assistant at Knopf, and she kept pushing the book until he bought it.

She became his editor.

Three months after the book came out he was high up in the

offices of a producer for Paramount, speaking about how great Tom Cruise would

be as Frank. He quit his job that day.  A

few months after that he was working with Paul Schrader on the screenplay, and

just a few months after the book was published by Knopf, in 1998, he was on the

movie set in Hell’s Kitchen, a consultant on the movie being shot in the same

streets he’d worked for 12 years.

He started a second novel, Crumbtown, about a man who has

his life turned into a movie, a bank robber, who steals his life back again,

but he was having such a great time being a successful young writer that he did

very little writing. He ended up at a writing colony in the Adirondacks, Blue

Mountain Center, and worked well in the mountains, and moved his family there

shortly after. Two months later he watched the towers fall at 9/11, knowing his

friends were all there. He joined his local ambulance squad that week, and got

his paramedic license back, and realized how much he missed working with his

hands, the simple act of helping. A year later he was back on the streets of

New York, working for the same hospital.

In 2005 an earthquake hit Pakistan, killing 60,000 people. A

medic friend had been to Katrina a few months before, and said he was forming a

relief group. They were supposed to help out in a clinic in the Jelum Valley,