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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, but the Navy helicopter pilot they bribed in Islamabad ended up dropping them miles further upriver, in an area completely cut off from help. They hiked through Kashmir, caring for thousands of injured. A crew from Sixty Minutes found them in a small village near the Indian border, and the resulting segment was shown and repeated and won an emmy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in. The group had to come up with a name, and called themselves NYC Medics.

Since then, he’s been to disasters around the world: earthquakes floods and monsoons. This year the World Health Organization asked the group to help in a war zone, and in February he spent a month operating a Trauma Stabilization Point on the front lines of the battle for Mosul.

He runs the local ambulance squad in North Creek, where he’s been volunteering and working as a paramedic for the past 15 years. It’s a different experience helping your neighbors, people you know, so far from the hospital and the social services available in the rest of the state. The trauma he’s seen in his town, and in the responders he volunteers with, has become the focus of his next book, called The Awful Grace.

penguin random house – Joe Connelly

Click here to buy Bringing Out The Dead

EMS World Article about NYCMedics by Joe Connelly

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