By Brendan O’Meara
Man, we lost another wonderful, brilliant, generous member of the writing community, CNFers. Philip Gerard passed away earlier this week.
A few weeks ago we lost Matt Tullis, a wonderful writer of narrative nonfiction, and a teacher of longform journalism. When he was working on what would become his memoir Running with Ghosts, he attended an MFA program out of Wilmington, NC, spearheaded by Philip Gerard.
Phil was someone who had always been one of those dudes I could call on if I had a question on writing, dating all the way back to 2008 when I wrapped up my MFA, right through 2017 and 2019 when he was one of the best guests on this very podcast. I never had him as a mentor in grad school, but he was always someone whose brain I liked picking. He never discounted you on wisdom and encouragement.
Originally, since I was traveling this week, I wasn’t going to publish an episode of the podcast. Then I checked my email for the first time in a week to find the news on Philip’s passing from Leslie Rubinkowski, the director of the creative nonfiction program at Goucher college. The subject line read “Philip Gerard,” so here I’m thinking that maybe he has a new book out and Leslie wanted me to interview him. Not so.
Naturally, I went back to the few times we spoke on mic and the emails we exchanged. Thankfully some of my emails with him survived my haphazard email purges. But I also went back and read some pull quotes from his first trip to the podcast way back on Ep. 38.
Here’s a sample of pull quotes I lifted from his first visit to the podcast in 2017 when his book The Art of Creative Research had come out:
“You’ve got to be daring. You’ve got to have that unshakable belief that ‘You know what? Somebody’s gonna publish a book someday. It might as well be me.’”
“I don’t really have hobbies. I have passions.”
“If I do this enough days in a row, probably I’m gonna get there.”
“I found that if I hang with them long enough, they would often tell me something interesting.”
“I began realizing there was a significant amount of work that wasn’t on the page, but if you did it, it would be on the page.”
“My problem is I’m interested in everything.”
“At a certain point the journey is over and you know it.”
While at summer residencies at Goucher, he’d kick up his feet (with epic cowboy boots) on a table, rest his acoustic guitar on his stomach and jam. At the ready was a glass of whiskey and a turn of phrase whipping the air like an open flame. He had a wonderful voice and was so into what you were working on. He seemed to have it all figured out. I think he did have it figured out. He lived and through the living brought it back so we might read about it. He wrote fiction, he wrote nonfiction, he wrote craft. He wasn’t concerned with being put in a box. He wanted to be in all the boxes.
Back in 2008, I wrote him an email because I knew he delved into fiction and nonfiction. At the time, I likely had a question about what direction to take with an idea I had, specifically how he makes his decision to write fiction vs. nonfiction for a book. In true Brendan fashion, it amounted to nothing, but Philip was generous as ever.
September 18, 2008
Dear Brendan,
Thanks for your note. I began as a fiction writer in undergrad, I guess partly because I wasn’t thinking of nonfiction as a very artistic genre. I published a few stories and then worked for awhile as a small town newspaper reporter, where I learned how to find out things. But I still mainly wanted to write books, so I set off to find a place where I could learn to do that and wound up at Arizona getting an MFA. They had no nonfiction track– almost nobody did in those days– so I continued to do fiction.
I did the book CREATIVE NONFICTION because I was invite to write a proposal for it specifically because they wanted a stortyteller, someone who worked in narrative, to do it. Investigating the genre really opened it up for me– I had an excuse to call every smart nonfiction writer I wanted and ask them questions.
Now I make a decision in the early phase of a project about whether it will be fiction or nonfiction, partly based on a very simple criterion: does the FACT that it happened matter? Or is the interest in something else? So I chose to write a novel about Paul Revere because I wasn’t interested so much in that fact but in who he was, a private life that left few tracks and needed to be imagined. SECRET SOLDIERS was nonfiction because otherwise it would have seemed too far-fetched. Those guys really were brave, and they are missing from all standard accounts of the war in Europe. Some shorter nonfiction is assignment-driven.
Once I decide which it is to be, I’m in either my fiction head or my fact head as I write and I pretty much know where the lines are.
Hope this helps. I think all writers eventually write beyond their starter genre, and who they are and what they need at certain times of their lives obviously plays a part. Good luck in your writing and best to the gophers!
All best,
Philip
The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers is one of the books I recommend the most. It is charged with tips and tricks, but foremost is Philip’s infective energy for the entire process of writing a book or an article. He embodied what it meant to live a life in words. Here’s a few words from TAoCR:
I love getting in my car in the predawn darkness, watching the dashboard glow blue and sliver and red as I turn the ignition, feel the neighborhood stillness all around me.
They’re all asleep, my neighbors, and I’m awake and stealing away on an adventure. I back out of the driveway slowly and roll up the street, the GPS beaming on the dashboard, toward a destination two hundred miles away, where I will talk to a stranger — an old moonshiner, who, in his wild youth, drove fast cars down twisting midnight roads on the adventure of his life — and hope that he will tell me what he knows and I need to know, some clue that will help me make sense of the history of half a million restless people and their descendants. And I don’t even know what that is.
It’s the not knowing that always gets me, the surprise waiting at the end of the road …
Philip was something of a Renaissance Man. He did so much but it never was the expense of anything else. Everything he did fed the furnace and it burned hot and bright.
To me, he kind of had the perfect writing career. He wasn’t famous famous, but he wrote abundantly and across many genres. He’s one of a legion of writers you wish was famous because his skill deserved it and he could have reached and inspired more people the same way he inspires me. He lifted others up. He celebrated other writers. He made writers believe they too could make a go of it. When you speak of being a good citizen of the writing community it’s people like Philip who inspire you to suit up and find the stories and bring them back
I once heard the author Jeff Pearlman recount when he asked the author Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie, for a blurb. And Mitch’s representative said something to the effect of “Mitch doesn’t do blurbs.”
And when I hear things like that, I think of people like Philip Gerard, who would never have said such a thing.
I’ll miss the great conversations I’ve had with Philip over the years over email and certainly on this podcast. So, appended to this remembrance are the two interviews I had with Philip, one from 2017 when The Art of Creative Research came out and the other from 2019 with his Civil War book The Last Battleground.
Lastly, one final passage from The Art of Creative Research:
At highway rest stops, I can’t help but wonder where everyone else has come from and where they are bound: the chic couple in the red convertible sports car, the rowdy family with all the wild kids pouring out of the camper, the pensive longer hurrying back from the restroom with his hands jammed tight in his windbreaker pockets. I want to get in all their cars with them and go someplace else, anywhere but here, and find out why: Why are they going? What’s waiting at the end of the road?
