This week, we hear from Jim Minick himself as he shares the journey of writing his newest book…

On May 25^th, 1955, an F5 tornado struck Udall, Kansas at 10:35 PM. There was no warning. In roughly three minutes, it destroyed most of the buildings, toppled the water tower, and killed 82 people. The Udall tornado was—and still is—the worst in the history of Kansas, and one of the worst in U.S. history.

            In May of 2011, I started interviewing survivors of this tornado, thus beginning a twelve-year-long journey to create the book Without Warning. Quickly, I learned what I had hoped to make into a novel would not work as fiction. The survivor stories were so powerful that the book had to be nonfiction; that was the only way to honor these people and their stories.

            If I wasn’t writing fiction, I still had to imagine my way into this story. I had to become an authority on the material before I could become the author. And then I had to make the story live inside me so that it would then live inside every reader. That was not easy. In many ways, this book is not my story. I didn’t grow up in this town, never lived in Kansas, never witnessed a tornado. And yet, to make the story work, I had to live it. I had to imagine my way into these people’s lives as they crawled over rubble to find help or as they took on the monumental task of rebuilding.

            In other words, to make it nonfiction, I still had to use great amounts of imagination, but all of that had to be grounded in what actually happened. So in addition to hundreds of hours of interviews, the book is also based on extensive research of the newspaper accounts from that time. And then, when possible, which was most of the time, I shared what I wrote, what I imagined, with the survivors. I wanted them to see what I was doing with their stories, and I wanted them to say, yes, that’s right.

            Thankfully, the years of labor proved worthwhile. The book has found a large audience, including the hundreds of people who still call Udall home. On the 68^th anniversary of the tornado, I gave a reading in the town’s Community Building, and the standing-room-only crowd was grateful to finally have their story captured for others to read, including the generations to come.

More Interviews with Jim Minick on Without Warning:

• Cardinal News Interview
• Daily Yonder Q & A