Abigail Carlin
Miller: “You’d be hard-pressed to find a better environment for writers to find ideas.”
After graduating from Harvard University in 2003 with a pre-med degree, Tom Miller found himself hiking for five days in New Zealand as part of a travel-guide writing assignment. With plenty of time to think, he began imagining a fictional universe where magic and science blurred together.
Over the years, he started writing two novels based on the world and characters inspired by those musings. He refers to one as “a noirish murder mystery” and the other as “a fish-out-of-water comedy.”
“In both of those cases, I made it 20 pages in and set it aside,” says Miller, now an emergency room doctor at UW Hospital. Instead, he wrote short stories while earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame and a medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh. (He graduated from Wauwatosa West High School in 1999.)
Finally, after reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — the 2005 debut by British author Susanna Clarke, who created a fantastical alternative history set during the Napoleonic Wars — Miller was inspired to give his novel a third try. The eventual result is The Philosopher’s Flight (Simon & Schuster), a debut that Publishers Weekly proclaims “reads like an American cousin to … Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, filtering 19th and 20th century U.S. history through a scrim of magical science.”
Miller, 37, refers to The Philosopher’s Flight as “historical fantasy.” Set in an alternative World-War-I America, the book’s protagonist is 18-year-old Robert Weekes, a practitioner of an arcane, female-dominated branch of science used to summon the wind, shape clouds of smoke and even fly.
Not exactly what you’d expect from a guy who, when he spoke with Isthmus, was working a 60-hour week in the surgical intensive care unit.
“It’s a gamble every writer makes,” Miller says about his perseverance, adding that he pursued a career in medicine just in case he couldn’t make money as a writer. “My colleagues are shocked and delighted at the idea of a doctor writer. And I love doing both. One of them gives me energy to do the other.”
Writing may exercise a different part of Miller’s brain than medicine, but he says his storytelling skills come in handy when explaining diagnoses, procedures, options and other critical information to patients and their families.
Similarly, Miller’s experiences as an emergency medical technician and an emergency room doctor helped shape scenes in his book. “As a doctor, I meet all kinds of people and see them under extreme stress,” he says. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a better environment for writers to find ideas.”
The author believed in The Philosopher’s Flight so much that he took two years off from pursuing his medical career to write the book, and he’s already making revisions to the sequel. Much of that second book was written at Sequoya Library in the Midvale Plaza Shopping Center.
Miller returned to his residency at UW Hospital in 2017 and expects to complete it in 2019. Then he hopes to stick around Madison. He currently lives on the west side with his wife and two young children, and he envisions practicing medicine while writing a series based on The Philosopher’s Flight, which could expand to four or five books.
“This has been a very long time in coming,” he says.
A short book tour for The Philosopher’s Flight launches Feb. 19 at A Room of One’s Own, 315 W. Gorham St., at 6 p.m.
