A new novel by Patrick Gabridge,

Q&A about Tornado Siren, with Patrick Gabridge:

          Q: What drew you to write a novel centered around tornadoes? Were you interested in them as a kid?

A: Oh, definitely. I grew up in Central Illinois, and tornadoes were a regular part of every spring and summer. There’s something both so frightening about them, at an elemental level, and yet also so compelling. They’re almost like a mythological creature of such beauty that you can’t look away, even though it might destroy you. This juxtaposition really grabs me intensely, sort of like looking at photos of atomic bomb explosions, fantastically horrible and beautiful.
Most weather and natural elements are beyond our scope of vision. An earthquake or hurricane are too big to see, we only see the damage, not the actual event. A tornado fits within our very small human frame of reference.


Q: Your main character, Victoria, also seems drawn to them because of their inability to be completely explained or modeled. Is that also part of what draws you?

A: We can see tornadoes and have a pretty good guess at how they work, but they’re really still a mystery to scientists. There are thousand of them every year, but we can’t tell you with any precision when or where one is going to appear, let alone how powerful it will be or where it will go once it’s on the ground. Science has found lots of answers—we’re sequencing the human genome, discovering planets on distant solar systems, but there are still really tough questions out there.

Q: Ben Fulgar’s explanation for tornadoes is certainly unique, bit it also feels, as you said, mythological.

A: Exactly. Man has used myth to explain the unexplained for thousands of years. And relationships between mortals and immortals are a pretty classic part of literature. And in every such story, there’s always hell to pay.


Q: You’ve had a lot of success with your stage plays, with productions across the United States and even internationally. What made you decide to write a novel?

A: I’d had the idea for the story for a few years, and I did some research and reading, but it clearly wasn’t a story that would fit well on stage. Maybe it could make a film, but I wanted to look at the characters more in depth, and really want to try my hand at fiction. I was nervous about it, but writing the story as a first person narrative helped me a lot, because I just thought of it more like a big theatrical monologue at first, and that helped me get the past the initial panic of “what the hell am I doing?”


Q: This isn’t your first work to deal with science and scientists. If we look at your plays, In a Glass Cage, The Split, Reading the Mind of God and even Blinders and Pieces of Whitey, all have some scientific element or character. Is this conscious or just an intrinsic part of who you are?

A: A little bit of both. I grew up in a house suffused with science—my dad is a microbiologist—and as a kid I spent a lot of time tinkering around his lab. When he started a bio tech company, I worked for him for years, all through school. I went to MIT to be a computer scientist and was surrounded by scientists and engineers. My wife, whom I met at MIT, is an electrical engineer by training. So I guess the world of science is in my blood. I also think it’s become in the air, in the ether, of our culture and society, so writing about life will often take a writer into that arena. Though with the character of Ben, we’ve also got the complete opposite, a man completely divorced from technology and science. The intersection of those two worlds interests me. His life of complete simplicity is one that can seem very appealing in our maelstrom of e-mails and cell phones and cable on demand.


Q: The subject of race runs underneath this story, just like in Pieces of Whitey and The Prisoner of St. Pierre. You’re a white guy writing in the first person as a bi-racial woman, what’s bringing you to this place?

A: I’m dealing with race a lot in my work right now. More than ten years ago, my wife (who is white) and I adopted our daughter. She’s black. Once we took that step, everything changed, including my writing. Not the “wave a magic wand and Oh, Pat’s so enlightened” kind of change, but definitely the start of a journey with plenty of chances to explore, not just an opportunity, but an imperative to examine and learn and change. One important aspect of race for Victoria is that it makes her an outsider in the her world of science--there just aren’t many women meteorologists of color. This notion of being on the outside leaves her disconnected from a lot in her life, and that’s a quality that she shares with Ben—it brings them together quickly.


Q: Now that this book is about to come out, will there be a second?

A: I'm already working on it.