Philip Gerard

Philip Gerard holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. A former newspaperman and freelance journalist, he has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, and The World & I. He is the author or Hatteras Light, a novel (Scribners 1986; 1997 Blair in paperback), Brilliant Passage. . . a schooning memoir (Mystic 1989), two recent novels: Cape Fear Rising (Blair 1994; also in paperback), and Desert Kill (Morrow 1994), and Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press 1996; in paperback 1998), which has been selected by Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club.

He is currently at work on a new novel and on a new book about writing, for Story Press, entitled Writing the Big Book: Large Ideas, Public Subjects, and Universal Themes. National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" has twice broadcast his essays, 180 of which have been broadcast on NPR affiliates. His first public television documentary, "RiverRun-- Down the Cape Fear to the Sea," won numerous awards, including a Silver Reel Award from the International Television Association; nine other programs on Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand have aired on University of North Carolina Public Television and internationally. An hour-long documentary, "Treasure Coast-- the Natural Heritage of the North Carolina Shore," aired Sept. 10, 1997, and won the CASE (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) District III Grand Award and Special Merit Award for 1998. For two years, he was President of the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs. He has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sandhills Writing Conference, and the Goucher Summer Residency MFA program, and until this year directed the Professional and Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which now offers an MFA. He is married to Dr. Kathleen Johnson. He is an avid guitar player and sailor and sails regularly aboard his 32-foot sloop Suspense.

 

Page ONE
"Who were your literary inspirations when you were growing up? When did you decide you were going to be a writer and why?"

 

Philip G.
"I went to a Catholic elementary school and had terrific, dedicated teachers, most of them Franciscan nuns, all of whom encouraged me to read and later to write. It was simply in the air. I remember winning books such as The 1001 Arabian Nights and King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table in school spelling bees, of ordering David Copperfield and Great Expectations from the Scholastic Book Club, of just reading, reading, reading. We always got books for birthdays and Christmas -- Biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the How & Why books on everything from reptiles to space flight, Hardy Boys novels, all sorts of great stories. If your read enough stories, you naturally develop the urge to write some of your own. You learn to depend on stories for friendship, confidence, entertainment, fun, and the truth about things.

I planned to be a musician all through college and played in bands while studying Anthropology and English -- figured if music didn't work out I'd be an archeologist. Then I studied with Tom Molyneux, a brilliant short
story writer teaching at the University of Delaware-- the first person I ever knew who could talk about writing from the inside. Five minutes into his first class, I said to myself, "This guy is a REAL writer." And he encouraged me and published my first stories in the university literary magazine. Unfortunately, he committed suicide at the end of my senior year, right after I'd helped him move into a new home. I thought, if that's the writing life, I want no part of it. So I went to Vermont to become a ski bum and bartender but instead wrote a novel, which thankfully has never been published. I set a goal-- to write 300 pages of a single story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. As I finished each chapter, I used to read it to my roommate, Frank, and he'd raise questions: Why did so and so do that? What will so and so say when he finds out? It was a great exercise in reader-response, because I'd find out immediately what was interesting,
confusing, clumsy, or suspenseful. A great writing lesson. I then freelanced some nonfiction and went to work for a small newspaper back in Delaware. Ultimately I decided I really wanted to write books, so I went to a place where book writers were-- University of Arizona's MFA program. It was the best two years of my life till that point-- all these great writers running around and paying attention to my work! I felt so privileged, so energized, so humbled, so enthralled. That's the kind of atmosphere I wanted to create for our students here at UNCW."

 

Page ONE
"Your novel CAPE FEAR RISING was historical fiction which must have taken a lot of research. Where did the idea for this novel begin and how did you go about writing it? How long did this novel take you to write from research to final draft?"

 

Philip G.
"When I moved here to Wilmington, NC I began hearing tales of a riot that had happened long ago. One person would say, "Oh, yeah-- that was in 1890 when the blacks marched on the courthouse and they called out the national guard." Another person would say, "No, that was in 1920 and the Klan burned the black community." Finally somebody accurately located the event in 1898. I got curious. So I went to the campus library and checked out everything that had to do with the "riot" -- a few unpublished dissertations and theses, along with some of Alfred Moore Waddell's speeches and local history books. I was astonished that an event of this magnitude-- a calculated coup d'etat and a resulting racial massacre -- wasn't widely known. I thought there'd be dozens of books, at least half a dozen recent novels, but there weren't.

When I first heard about the event, it seemed a classic case of racist violence: a small cadre of rich white men manipulated a lot of poor white men with guns into attacking the black community. I have always recognized the injustice of racism, but it has not been my particular passion as a writer. But as I investigated the chain of events that led to November 10, 1898, when a thousand armed white men took to the streets and murdered an untold number of blacks, I discovered that the flashpoint for the whole ugly business was the Daily Record, which billed itself as the first "Afro-American" daily newspaper in the country. The editor, Alex Manly, was banished from the city under a death sentence and his newspaper office was burned to the ground– because of an editorial he had written. Now I was circling closer to my passions. I've always been passionate about freedom of expression– a writer usually is. In particular, I'm passionate about writing-- the sublime mystery of how the right words in the right order excite our emotions and rouse us to thought and action. In an important way, the events of 1898 were played out first in written and then spoken words-- in narrative: newspaper stories, white supremacist campaign speeches, political resolutions (including The White Declaration of Independence) sermons from the pulpits of white and black churches. In the midst of the violence, the white vigilantes hauled the mayor and the board of alderman into city hall at gunpoint and made them resign. It is
widely believed to be the only coup d'etat in American history.

At last I had penetrated to the core of the incident– and to the core of my passion. Sure, it was a story about racism, and about freedom of expression. But it was more than that: it was a story about the failure of democracy. About that moment when the social contract breaks down, all bets are off, and a progressive community with good schools, telephones, an opera house, and a well-educated citizenry turns into Beirut.
That's why the events fascinated me so, and my passion lay in uncovering the why of such a civic failure: What were the motivations of the principal players? What were the conditions that made the city ripe for violent revolution? Was it inevitable, or could determined men and women of conscience have stopped it? The novel was not about a Southern city in 1898. It was about every city in the world in 1998. And it was the kind of story that, once I knew it, I felt obligated to write. I couldn't turn away from it."

 

Page ONE
"In your novel class you have said that most good novels contain a signature and that signature can most of the time be seen on the first or second page. For those that don't know what I'm talking about would you describe what you mean by a novel's signature and what was the signature for CAPE FEAR RISING?"

 

Philip G.
"I've always maintained that if you can't boil down the arc of a novel into a sentence, you don't know enough yet to write your novel. Moby Dick: Obsessive captain hunts white whale. The Odyssey: Guy comes home from a war. It sounds simple-minded, but everything in a novel always comes back to that basic driving idea. The Great Gatsby: Poor Boy tries to win Rich Girl. It's not for a second what you're interested at the deeper level, but it makes the deeper level possible. It pulls the reader through the action on a literal and figurative level. In Cape Fear Rising, the signature is simple: A stranger comes to town. It's contained in the very first line of the Prologue: the first line: "STRANGERS, THEY COME TO TOWN." The book designer even put it in all caps. Every element of plot, every thematic concern, arises from that simple fact. The blacks are strangers in 1831, just as the black community in 1898 has become a stranger, unwelcome, a threat, The Other. Sam and Gray Ellen Jenks are strangers. Ivanhoe Grant is a militant stranger. When the stranger comes to town, the whole balance is upset, and order must be restored. In this case, the attempt to restore "order" is a disastrous and brutal betrayal of democracy. The ending, of course, solves the problem of strangers, at least for the white supremacists in town: they put all the "strangers" on trains out of town-- banish them--or kill them. No more strangers. Ironically, though, the people left behind have become strangers to themselves. One of the men of the Wilmington Light Infantry, who rode with Walker Taylor, wrote a letter to his sweetheart that he didn't recognize himself, that she would not have
recognized him, as he rode with the vigilantes and killed Negroes. So in casting out the strangers, they themselves became the strangers to be feared."

 

Page ONE
"I read somewhere that you wrote the novel DESERT KILL between the hours of midnight and four a.m. Is this is true and did you do this for story?"

 

Philip G.
"Writing the novel was practically a nightmare-- I usually have vivid dreams of any novel I'm working on, and the case of DESERT KILL the dreams were horrible, bloody, frightening nightmares, possibly brought on by the fact that I wrote just before going to bed, as well as a dark period I was going through. I wrote it during those hours because my teaching schedule allowed me little choice. I have always believed that to be a teaching writer I must first be a working writer, and you can't do that on summer holidays and weekends or you'll write like a hobbyist. So I make my schedule accommodate my writing somehow. The upside of working at night is that it's quiet, the telephone doesn't ring, and nobody bothers you. The downside is you're burning the candle at both ends. For some reason, fiction works Better at night, maybe because it is only once removed from dreams anyhow."

 

Page ONE
"You have written Historical fiction (CAPE FEAR RISING, HATTERAS LIGHT);psychological suspense (DESERT KILL) And nonfiction (BRILLIANT PASSAGE - a schooning memoir & CREATIVE NONFICTION - RESEARCHING AND CRAFTING STORIES OF REAL LIFE). Which of these areas of writing do you draw the most self gratification and why?"

 

Philip G.
"Fiction is always harder than nonfiction because you have to invent so relentlessly. Since gratification is proportional to the difficulty of the challenge, I guess fiction is the most satisfying. The novel is for me the
grand dame of literature, and I love being able to work with the same characters and situation over the long haul. Each time you begin a novel, you have to reinvent the form, while creating the illusion that it is familiar. You have effects of scale in the novel simply because of the accretion of scenes, of images, of motifs, so that there is a cumulative effect not possible in a short piece. The novel is GREAT in the old-fashioned sense of having a panoramic sweep through space and time and sensibility. Forster talked about WAR & PEACE as a terrifying and exhilarating symphony of a novel in which "great chords begin to sound." That's the novel at its best. Having said all that, I will also say that writing a good piece of nonfiction about the world is incredibly exhilarating. The challenge is to be true to the world in a very actual way that can be verified by your reader while spinning a good story. There's a tension between the two demands that lends an electricity to the piece when it's working (and that just drives you crazy when it's not).

Right now I find myself writing a nonfiction book and a novel at the same time, and the process calls for some compartmentalization. The nonfiction book is much more analytical, the novel much more intuitive. Yet I outlined both with a cold eye toward a structure that would create the effects I'm after, and there are moments in the nonfiction book when I create stories to illustrate a point; there are times in the novel when I delve into technical writing about meteorology. So there's always some connection between the two."

 

Page ONE
"In your office you have a sign that reads 'THINK'. What is the origin of this sign and what does its message mean to you?"

 

Philip G.

"THINK was the old motto of IBM (may still be). The wooden sign used to hang in my father's office-- he helped oversee the installation and trial of the old IBM Univac and other early IBM computers for DuPont. (You could walk around inside that computer-- it took up a whole room, rows and rows of vacuum tubes. It cost millions, then in a few years it was obsolete, and the junk man gave them $200 for the scrap metal.) For me the sign is a reminder not always to shoot from the hip, but to probe beyond my first impression, first thought, obvious answer to a more profound level of understanding. Thinking is what makes us human, but the world is full of people who never think."

 

Page ONE
"What general advice do you have for writers who just completed their first novel? What do they do now?"

 

Philip G.
"Write the next one. Once you're sure the first novel is as absolutely good as you can make it, send it out to an agent or editor and get started on the next one. Don't wait-- selling a novel can be frustrating and demoralizing, though once you DO publish it, miraculously all the heartache is replaced by euphoria. But in the meantime, you want to be working at your craft, keeping your head and heart in the writing. Your most important book is always the next one."