An Interview with Kate Campo, author of Service

Kate Campo is a pseudonym. The author is a primary care physician in New England, who grew up reading books and spending time by the ocean. She works in the greater Boston area and enjoys reading and writing on the weekends.

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Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I always knew I wanted it to be called Service. This is one of those words that means something else in the medical world. When a doctor tells another doctor they’re on service for the month, it means they are working twelve fourteen-hour days for thirty or thirty-one days in a row, maybe with one or two weekend days off, but maybe not. And you might be on call at night from home, by phone, also—Kelly is not, because her team is set up a little differently, but it’s not unheard of. Being on service is a lot of time at the hospital, a lot of teaching—and it’s a month when your laundry won’t get done, your kids will be with a sitter, you won’t be able to exercise or get to the dentist or whatever. It’s a bad, bad month for your personal life. So, of course, when I imagined Kelly—a single mom who doesn’t trust her own judgment—I was like, let’s put her on her service month, when she’s in a pressure cooker and has to make a lot of judgment calls. And let’s make her service month the month of the marathon bombing, just to dial it up a little more. I wanted her to be under maximum pressure.

But for people who aren’t doctors, Service has a sort of noble connotation, like you’re doing good deeds. Which is also kind of true. So, I stayed with my original idea for the title, because I thought it captured everything the best.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

It felt like a huge deal to hold this book in my hands because it was so different from my first book, and I think I had doubts that it would ever find readers. The cover, though, was exactly as I had hoped it would be. I really like working with Ronaldo Alves, the artist who does covers for Atmosphere. He really listens to your vision and tries to work with you.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I am a voracious reader, so it’s hard to name just one person who has influenced me. But I love writing and have always written stories, even when I was little. Music also influences me, and movies. And, of course, my work influences me, in that it’s a very specific world and it inspires me to write about that world in a fictional way.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I have had so many different jobs over the years, before becoming a physician. One interesting job I had was as a research assistant in a study about maternal feeding behaviors. I watched videos of moms feeding their babies and coded them based on certain things the mom and baby did. I didn’t realize until I had my own child how much I had learned about feeding and how it could be a bonding experience.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

This is my second book, and it was really different from the first. By far the most rewarding part of the process was revising it with my editor from Atmosphere, who was amazing. The book needed a lot of revision and she had great ideas—pointing out things that didn’t work but trusting me to fix them. I loved working with her, and her input made the book so much better.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

I listened to a lot of different music as I wrote this book. I imagine Kelly and Martin as sharing a love for old-school hip-hop music, so I listened to a lot of tracks from the late ’80s and early ’90s, especially Digital Underground, Coolio, and groups like New Edition. I love that era of music—it’s witty and playful, and I liked that these two very serious medical researchers would be, like, driving home blasting “Fantastic Voyage” on their car stereo. Because the book was set in a particular month in 2013, which is a year I remember very well, I also revisited some music from that spring—especially Sara Bareilles’s album “The Blessed Unrest,” which I thought was unforgettable.

Apart from music, I also watched a lot of documentary footage about the marathon bombing to try to re-access the horror and PTSD of that week. I didn’t work the bombing in any capacity, so my imagination was free to roam around what the hospital’s response might have been in the novel, without worrying that I was unconsciously remembering any particular patients.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

Anyone who likes to read fiction is a perfect reader, honestly. I have been amazed and pleased to see how many different readers have responded to my first book, Progress Notes, and to this one. I guess what I’m hoping people will take away is a sense that doctors are human, and in many cases they are dealing with challenges and struggles in their own lives while taking good care of their patients. I think sometimes patients have the impression that their doctor doesn’t have any struggles—that they’re rich and they play golf on their day off and vacation in Aruba, or something. Not that those things are bad. But lots of doctors have their own things they’re dealing with, and none of it seeps into their work life because they’re professionals. And their mission is to take care of people.

One of the other messages of this book is that women can survive trauma and PTSD. They can be kind to themselves and decide to accept good things in their lives. And sometimes wisdom comes from unexpected places—but mostly, it comes from inside ourselves.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

I am finishing up a second draft of a new novel that revisits the characters from Service several years later. It was an interesting challenge to work with those characters again and try to give them a new and different story. I’m in an MFA program now, and this third novel was the one that I brought there, so I could work on it and learn from it more intentionally, which has been amazing. I’ve also written some shorter pieces, which have been published under my real name, so it seems like I always have something that’s in progress.

In my real life, I write NIH grants as a big part of my job—like Kelly—and while it’s a different kind of writing, I also find it somewhat creative and very satisfying to complete a grant proposal and then see how it is scored by reviewers. I wouldn’t say fun, exactly, but it’s endlessly challenging and sometimes satisfying.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

It was a great experience, largely because of my work with the editor I worked with. She was smart and insightful and trusted me to work on revisions while giving me honest feedback. I learned to love the revision process through my work with her, and her input made this book so much better than it had been.

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