Jenna Blum researched her second novel, The Stormchasers, by chasing tornadoes for five years and it shows in the details of this tense, whirlwind of a read. She also does an excellent job of creating a touching portrait of a young woman's relationship with her bipolar brother, drawing on her own experiences. Here's more from Jenna:
Jennifer Haupt: How did you first get interested in chasing tornados?
Jenna Blum: I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep-an experience I encoded in The Stormchasers. For a little girl obsessed with The Wizard Of Oz, this tornadic encounter was terrifying but also terribly exciting, and I spent subsequent decades trying to see another tornado.
When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties and my mom lived there too, I used to take her "stormchasing"-by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm. This resulted, predictably, in disasters like us crouching in an abandoned barn with a tornadic storm coming on and the animals running like heck in the other direction (geese run; I have seen this!). I never did see another tornado this way, though, and eventually I figured out it'd be safer, more efficient, and kinder to my mom if I went stormchasing with people who knew what they were doing. I found Tempest Tours online, the model for Whirlwind Tours in my novel, and have been chasing with them for the past five years. This year, I've graduated to hosting my own tours for Tempest! Come along! We see lots of tornadoes. Safely.
JH: How much research did you do to develop a realistic character with bipolar disorder? Do you have someone close to you with this condition?
JB: I have people in my family with bipolar disorder, and for years I've watched them struggle with the disorder's extreme moods and often devastating consequences. I've felt the way my heroine Karena does in The Stormchasers: totally helpless, sidelined while people you love more than anything suffer from what she calls "the gift nobody wants to get given." Frustrated because it's so difficult to find the right medicine to treat bipolar disorder, which is a grab bag of symptoms unique to the individual who has it.
It's also often hard for people who are bipolar to stay on their meds not just because of the side effects, which can be legion, but because they miss their manias! I've had the experience of being terrified to enter a room because I don't know whether my loved one will be the kind, generous, funny, super-intelligent, sweet soul who's not under the influence of a severe mood swing--or the terrifying hypo-manic presence Karena calls "the djinn, the Stranger."
My own therapist (it's great for a writer to have a therapist) says caretakers of bipolar love ones often describe the mood swings as watching a demonic possession. Bipolar is a problem without easy solution, if there is a "solution" at all. I spent many years reading everything I could find about the disorder, from Dr. Kay Jameson's excellent An Unquiet Mind about coping with her own bipolar disorder to the point at which she became a specialist in it, to the DSM-IV. And, like all subjects that trouble me but I can't find an answer for, I turned it into a novel.
JH: Do you have any siblings? If so, did you draw on your relationships with them to develop the relationship between Karena and Charles in The Stormchasers?
JB: I have a brother I love dearly, although we're not twins! I'm ten years older than he is, so I sometimes feel like his second mother. We do have some twin-like characteristics, though: we finish each other's sentences. We can look at each other and know what the other is thinking. We're both writers, and without consulting each other we've developed similar routines: writing longhand, using special pens, wearing specific writing shirts. I love the relationship I have with my brother, and because of our closeness it felt like a small step to research and write a twinship for Karena and Charles for The Stormchasers - which I did because people who have bipolar family members but aren't bipolar themselves often feel terrible guilt, and since twins Charles and Karena are the primary relationship in each other's lives, Karena's guilt is exponentially exacerbated.
JH: Your first novel, Those Who Save Us, was published in 2005 and is still showing up on bestseller lists around the world. What did you learn from your experience writing the first novel that was most helpful with writing the second novel?
JB: I am utterly humbled and amazed that readers made Those Who Save Us into a New York Times bestseller and are now keeping it lofted on the Dutch bestseller list! Not that I don't love the novel. I do, fiercely. It and The Stormchasers are my children. Still, this is the sort of success you usually only imagine for your children, and I'm grateful beyond words readers have made those dreams come true.
The success of
Those Who Save Us had an interesting effect on the writing of
The Stormchasers. I often compare the writing of the two novels to giving birth under very different circumstances.
Those Who Save Us, a debut novel, was like giving birth in a shack in the woods with nobody knowing or caring, wondering if anybody would be there to help you with the baby when it came out.
The Stormchasers, because the first novel has done so well, was sold before it was written, so I had a
team of expert obstetricians constantly monitoring its progress, saying, "How's the baby doing today? Is it kicking? How're you feeling?"
Unaccustomed to writing fiction on a deadline-and discovering quickly that inspiration is no respecter of deadlines--I became paralyzed and succumbed to writer's block, which for me assumed the form of writing about the novel every day, replying to email, carousing on Facebook, then going shopping. Eventually my agent sent me to southeastern Minnesota, to the little rural town where my storm fascination began, and requested that I send her a chapter a day while living with my black Lab in a motel there. That's what I did, and I learned I could write a novel in 2.5 months. It was an extraordinary fever dream of a process.
JH: How do you balance the creative process of writing with the heavy duty promotion that you are still doing for your first novel and now your second novel too?
JB: My writing life is kind of like crop rotation: when I'm working on a book, I'm in the Writers' Protection Program, as when I was living at the motel in rural Minnesota and working on The Stormchasers. This means I wear the same yoga pants for three days in a row and emerge from my writing room only to get more coffee and walk my black Lab, Woodrow. My family and friends know I'm in lockdown and sometimes will literally leave food for me outside the door. I do this because I can't concentrate on the real world and the fictional world at the same time; it's like listening to two competing radio stations at once. I love doing it.
When I come out of the Writers' Protection Program, I equally love meeting readers! I speak at events, libraries and book clubs all over the country -- for Those Who Save Us, I visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone. For The Stormchasers, I just finished a two-month driving tour that took me to MN, IA, KS, OK, TX, MS, AL, FL, GA, KY, OH, IL, IN, and back to Boston again. I keep my readers in the loop by posting my adventures, including photos, on Facebook and Twitter.
