GPC Writer-in-residence pens new book, The Fireman's Wife

by Jennifer Johnson
The Collegian
Issue date: 11/5/08

Jack Riggs, Writer-in-Residence and instructor at Georgia Perimeter College, will have a new novel on bookstore shelves this December.

The Fireman's Wife, set in the Lowcountry Carolinas and areas in the 1970's South, tells the story of Cassie and Peck, a couple struggling with their relationship after 15 years of marriage.

The author-whose previous novel, When the Finch Rises, won him the Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel-works with The Writer's Institute at GPC and arranges the college's many literary events and author visits.

The complex characters are the focal point of the story, though readers may be draw into the incidents that fireman Peck encounters on a daily basis. For these encounters, Riggs did a lot of research. "The internet is an amazing thing," said the author.

Though the book began as a story about firemen, its beginning was more accidental. "I've always talked about the book as being a book of necessity rather than of love and inspiration. But as I was writing it, it became love," said Riggs.

The Fireman's Wife came about after pitching a book to his publisher, Ballantine Books, which didn't go through. Ballantine asked if Riggs had any other projects in the works. Riggs, sitting on the beach, talking to his agent, found his inspiration with the sound of a fire engine crying out in the distance.

"I told my agent, 'I'm going to write about a fireman," said Riggs. When he sat down to write the book, the first thing he put at the top of the page was the date June 1973.

"That's where it started. It became 1970 later, because I had to keep pushing it back for various reasons-things and hot button issues I thought would be in the book."

What started out as a fireman's book, said Riggs, became more of the story of the fireman's wife, Cassie.

Riggs observed his wife, not overtly, but unconsciously, as a writer often does, in order to write from a female perspective. Some of those who read early drafts of Fireman, said Riggs, weren't all that fond of the titular character.
"I always liked Cassie," said Riggs, "Because I always understood what she was trying to do. I love her because she struggles. It’s taken her 15 years to get up the courage, to take that leap."
Riggs was able to craft Kelly, the couple's 15 year-old daughter, with a lot of inspiration from his 12 year-old daughter, "a bundle of emotion" he watched and imagined interacting with him a few years from now.

Crafting characters has always been important to Riggs. That was one of the challenges about The Fireman's Wife.

"One of my concerns was that I didn't want either one of the characters to be a bad guy," said Riggs of Peck and Cassie, "because it was a relationship story, and it was about both of these people's dynamic personalities, separating and battling back towards each other in a way." To achieve this, Riggs opted for a dual-narrator approach, featuring both Cassie and Peck's perspectives through the summer of 1970.

Riggs is pleased with the work, though when he was writing it, he didn't know how the book would end.

"That's where the love comes in for the work… this began as a work of necessity, but once I understood my characters in the geography, the setting for which they live, they start telling me the story."

The first time Riggs let a character tell him the story he describes as a life-changing experience. "I'll never forget it, I'm learning a lesson… and no one is teaching it to me."

The Fireman's Wife will be available in December and would make the perfect Christmas gift for fans of Southern writers.