Author shares experiences as rescue worker with local book club

By JEN COWART
Posted 10/25/18

Saint David’s on-the-Hill Episcopal Church recently welcomed local author and retired Providence Rescue worker, Michael Morse to their book club’s annual author night.  The club invites an …

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Author shares experiences as rescue worker with local book club

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Saint David’s on-the-Hill Episcopal Church recently welcomed local author and retired Providence Rescue worker, Michael Morse to their book club’s annual author night.  The club invites an author to its gathering each year to discuss not only their experiences in writing but also their experiences in life. Oftentimes, one begets the other. For Morse, such was the case.

An author who began his writing career at age 40, Morse was inspired by his life’s work as a rescue worker, with a decade on the job at the time.

“The job is intense,” he said. “After 10 or 11 years, I started thinking about the things that happen on a daily basis and I thought to myself, ‘this could be a book.’ It was Easter weekend 2004 and I said, ‘This is the shift. Whatever happens on this shift will be a book.’ I started when I got in the car, I wrote down the song on the radio, I wrote about the sun shining through the windshield and how the windshield was frozen. I wrote about the trip that I took to work every day down Narragansett Parkway and the sunrise on the water, the dumbest things that I normally took for granted, I wrote them all down.”

It was the mundane tasks on a shift that Morse realized interested people most.

“It was the fact that at the shift change, there are always six people on at the station, and you hand off the radio to the next person. Vinny D’Ambra looked horrendous at that shift change, and I wrote that down. The first call was a 911 call that came in. The shift seems like a mixture of mundane to us, but to the people who are having the problems, it is anything but mundane. For the next 36 hours, I made a note about everything, and I filled two sticky pads.”

Morse wasn’t an author and didn’t consider himself one.

“I could kind of write, but I thought I had no business writing a book,” he said. “It was hard to do, harder than I thought. I looked up ‘How to write a book,’ and the best advice I got was to be fearless. It said that if your story is going to be very good, you can’t hold back. You have to be brutally honest with your story or other people’s stories.”

Morse had to contend with how to be brutally honest with his story and those stories of the people he encountered daily, and how to keep from exploiting those stories.

“There were people who had been shot, sexually assaulted, who were intoxicated, falling out of buildings or dying,” he said. “It didn’t seem right to exploit their stories so that I could write a book. I decided to tell the story through their eyes.”

It took Morse about a year to get his story the way he liked it.

“The first draft was kind of awful,” he said. “I didn’t want it to seem hokey or contrived, I wanted it to seem real.”

He struggled too, with putting such an emotional side of himself out in the open with his colleagues.

“It was intimidating to put my feelings out there,” he said. “Before it was published, I had a huge manuscript. Getting published was not easy. I got rejected about 100 times, it seemed. The first thing I’d read was that I’d get rejected, but I didn’t think it would happen to me. I wasn’t really rejected, it was more like I was ignored. I had looked up how to write a query letter, and I had sent them out, and I got no response to about the first 100. Eventually, I started getting actual rejection letters and after the first three or four of those, I started to know what was coming and after about the tenth one, they were just the same over and over.”

It wasn’t until literary agent Ethan Ellenberg read and loved the story, that it was sent out to larger publishing houses, all of who rejected it. Finally, Paladin Press in Boulder Colorado expressed an interest in publishing Morse’s “Rescuing Providence.”

“They publish books like how to be a hit man, how to make bombs, but they wanted to publish my book,” he said.

Once “Rescuing Providence” was out there, Morse found it tough to market the book.

“At the time, Erin at Border’s Books loved the book, so I bought 600 copies and I brought them to Borders 100 copies at a time and sold them. I’d love to say I was on the international bestseller list, but I wasn’t. I sold about 5,000 books locally.”

It was enough though, to spark a love of writing and telling one’s story in Morse. He started a blog by the same name, Rescuing Providence rescuingprovidence.com in order to continue telling his stories. He began writing another book.

“The first one had a beginning, a middle and an end,” he said. “It was leaving for work, being at work and coming home. My next one, ‘Rescue One Responding,’ was picked up and distributed by Simon and Schuster and distributed by Post Hill Press.

One after another, Morse published book after book.  “Rescuing Providence,” “Rescue One Responding,” “City Life,” and “Rescue 911” were each written by Mores and published, each with a similar theme running through them. It was “Mr. Wilson Makes it Home,” a story about Morse’s dog, Mr. Wilson, which showed a more unusual side of Morse’s life.

“This story came about when I thought I was all done writing books,” he said. “My wife and I had two dogs for about 12 years, a husky and a malamute and they both died on the same day. It was tragic. About three years later, my wife said, ‘I’m getting you a dog for your birthday.’ I was expecting another big dog, and she showed me a picture of this little thing, an ankle biter, and I said, ‘I don’t want it.’ But, we drove out down 395 to Moosup, Connecticut and we waited for this big red tractor-trailer truck to drive out of the mist and pull up into the center of the lot. It was kind of magical the way it happened. There were scruffy guys like me, families with kids, and couples. And, it was love at first sight. He was the coolest little dog, and he still is. When I met the people that rescued Mr. Wilson, and I heard about how they go out west to Ohio and down through Tennessee and they make about 20 stops rescuing all these dogs and head back up to the Northeast, I said to them, ‘I’m going to write a book about you people.’”

A year later, Morse said the story told itself.

“In the book I talked a bit about the other two dogs, my job, my wife and the fact that she has MS, and our relationship. In fact, my wife wrote the forward in the book. I was not doing too well for a while there. The job had worn me out and I had what I’d say is like PTSD. Getting off the job helped me a lot. I was disillusioned, bitter and angry and it had taken a toll on my marriage.”

Morse spoke of how he and his wife saved Mr. Wilson, and that Mr. Wilson in turn, helped to save them as well.

As time has gone on, Morse has had other opportunities to write, including a “My Turn” column in the Providence Journal, and he encouraged those in his audience at St. David’s who have a story to tell to give it a try.

“I barely graduated high school,” he said. “Getting published for me was a one-in-a-million shot. I don’t think any time is a bad time to start writing, whether you’re 40, 50, 60 or 70. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Prior to writing, I didn’t express myself but now I do express myself in my writing.”

Morse told the group that his biggest surprise was the support that came from his colleagues when he started writing about more emotional things.

“These big, mean old scruffy guys at the fire station who make fun of you if you wear white socks or make fun of your haircut, they loved it. The most important thing is that 99 percent of them are thinking the exact same things,” he said. “They would not think to say it or to write it, but they’re thinking it and they were so supportive.”

The response from the audience at St. David’s was positive and the guests described their own emotional responses to reading some of Morse’s work. Before the conclusion of the event, Morse read some of his writing aloud and took questions before the book-signing portion of the night began.

Morse can also be found on Facebook where he writes at facebook.com/mmorsepfd.

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