Maggie Dubris

I worked full time as a 911 medic in New York City from 1980 until recently. What turned out to be the most interesting to me wasn’t the medicine part, or the emergency part. It was the people I met. The situations they were in and the way that they made their way through this world. A lot of our patients I wouldn’t have even thought about before I got on the ambulance. If I did think about them, I sure didn’t think they were like me. They were almost lesser type of being, who must have for some reason decided to go live under a bridge, and didn’t mind it as much as I would have.
The ambulance plunged me into their world. What I found there wasn’t anything like what I expected. It also wasn’t like anything I had known before. What it was like was the books that I loved most—books by Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, Mark Twain. It was as if those stories and poems were playing themselves out among the poorest people in the city, had somehow sunk into that world and outlived the men who wrote them.
I found out that my patients weren’t nearly as clichéd as I’d imagined. They had pasts as musicians or poets or truckdrivers, they were funny and strange and sad and could be oddly kind. Most of the time the only thing I could do for them was remember their names, and maybe stop my ambulance if I saw them on the street and chat. So that’s what I did. I ended up getting to know a lot of people that way, to follow their lives, and to care about them.
When I wrote Skels, I was thinking about what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would I have done if I had met the greatest poet of all, and been granted the chance to save him. Not from dying, but from his own life.
I want people to read my book and see what I saw. Not what I literally saw but the way it felt in my soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside. I want them to think about how people who are considered the lowliest by our society can have something wonderful hidden inside them.

Maggie Dubris is a writer and musician who lives and works in New York City. She is the author of Skels (Soft Skull Press, 2004), Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press 2002) and WillieWorld (Cuz Editions, 1998). For ten years she was lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Homer Erotic, an all female extravaganza who performed at festivals and in clubs, and put out two CDs (Yield and Homerica the Beautiful). In 2000 she put out a spoken word CD, Welcome to WillieWorld, with composer Andy Teirstein. She has worked for many years as a 911 paramedic in New York's Times Square area, and is presently employed as a professional hypnnotist.

As of now (2006) you can get Skels from amazon.com, powells.com, and barnes&noble.com. You can also get it on amazon international.
It is available at Barnes and Noble Stores, and many independant bookstores nationwide