Philip Gerard is a native of Newark, Delaware. He earned bachelor’s degrees in English and anthropology from the University of Delaware and a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona. After teaching and working as a writer in residence at Arizona State University, he moved to coastal North Carolina, where he had spent many summers as a teenager. Gerard has published three novels and has written and edited several books of nonfiction. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Mr. Gerard spoke to museum employee Beth Crist about the connection between literature and geography.

Crist: Why is it important for a writer to establish a strong setting, a sense of place, in both fiction and creative nonfiction?

Philip Gerard: John Gardner, a teacher of mine and a writer I greatly admire, used to talk about a story as a vivid, continuous dream, and that’s the way I think of it. I want my readers to be someplace actual. I want them to be able to picture it. I want it to be real. I want them to be able to look out the window and know what’s there. I also think of setting not just as an arbitrary and descriptive thing but as a stage of action. I tell my students they should ask why the stage matters. Could the story happen somewhere else? It shouldn’t be able to; the story should depend on where it occurs. There are some stories that can’t happen except in the northeast or the southwest or at the beach. The stage is actually very much like you would create in a play or movie. The stage creates a mood and gives the characters a sense of who they are. It also provides characters with opportunities for action, so I tell my students writing fiction that they should choose a place where something can happen that would be more interesting because of the place itself, somewhere that lends drama and comments on the scene or story. As well as being a stage of action, the setting is also there to comment on the characters and story and contribute to themes.

In the case of nonfiction, the setting is important because part of the fact of the piece is where and when it happened. In my most recent book, Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception, it’s important that the reader knows that that winter was the coldest one in fifty years and those soldiers were permanently cold because they didn’t have the proper clothes, that they always had colds and sore throats and had trouble breathing because they had pneumonia, that they were always hungry and always dirty, all of which had to do with the setting. It was cold, snowy, rainy, muddy, and dangerous, with flying bombs and shrapnel around them. You have to put the reader there to appreciate that ordinary things become heroic in this setting. For a man to stay awake for forty-eight hours is one thing, but for him to be awake for forty-eight hours under a bombardment while he’s got pneumonia and is sitting in a foxhole full of icy water guarding his comrade, then that becomes something much more heroic.

Crist: In your writing, you describe the scents, sounds, sights, and even the physical feel of a place so that your readers experience the setting as if they are actually there. For instance, in Cape Fear Rising, a historical novel based around the 1898 Wilmington race riot, one character states, “This humidity—makes a man fairly ooze.” The character a little later notices he can “whiff the bitter ammoniac odor of the Navasso Guano factory” on the nearby wharf, and listens to life on the docks, noisy with workers and ships coming and going, remarking on the racket, “I like it—reminds me where I am.” These details vividly bring 1898 Wilmington to life and illustrate how important those details are to any place. How do you come up with the details that capture a setting so well?

Gerard: I think it’s important that writers don’t just catalog things. Some writers record every detail—there were brick columns and a mansard roof and two gargoyles and on and on. But really what the reader needs are one or two things to hitch onto, which will in turn make the other things come alive in a reader’s head. A few things tell you everything you need to know if you pick the right items. I had a student read a story yesterday in which he wrote a couple of good details. One was that house seemed tired, everything sagged, there were no sharp edges, and everything was kind of crooked, and the other was that the windows were grimy and the light came in a kind of filtered, dirty way. I stopped his reading and asked the class if they knew where they were, and a student said, “Oh yeah, I can just smell the beer in the carpet. The walls are pockmarked where people have hung pictures that the landlord has never fixed, and there’s an old ratty couch in the corner.” And everyone got a version of that. Further, just from those details you can probably figure out what’s in the cupboard and closets. It’s choosing a couple of really good signature details that will evoke the rest, and then coming back to those and enhancing them throughout the work. Again, it’s very much like a stage setting where you can’t do everything so you pick two or three things that you want prominent, and in a way they become part of the story itself.

Crist: In the formal study of geography, scholars must examine both the physical place under study as well as the people living there, and the relationship between them. Do writers examine the same facets of place and people before starting a new work?

Gerard: Yes. I live in a place right now where about a third of the people grew up here and have family ties here and the rest moved here from somewhere else. There’s a different dynamic in how the two groups treat the land and what they take for granted. The people who move here think it’s great to be able to live at the beach, as opposed to the people who’ve been here for years as watermen, who don’t really see it as all that special. They hardly see the beach as they make their living in the water, and they come out of the cove and rarely set foot on the beach. They have a different relationship to the land and seascape around them. When most people look at the coast here from the water, they don’t know what they’re looking at. It all looks like a low, undifferentiated coast. And yet people who’ve been watermen here for years can pick out an inlet or landmark on shore from the skimpiest of evidence; they can read the shadows. It’s important to understand this different appreciation of a place that residents have when writing about that place.

I wrote a novel, Desert Kill, set in the desert, and the desert became as much a facet of the book, almost a character, as anything else. It’s about a serial killer on the loose in the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. The book takes the position that Phoenix is an unnatural growth on the desert; it’s superficially attached to the desert. There’s nothing that grows very deep there; roots are shallow. All of that mattered to the story. The story wouldn’t have worked in Michigan or North Carolina. It mattered that it was the desert, that it was a harsh, unforgiving place. The location of it mattered, too. People had moved to California and realized they couldn’t live there, then turned around, and on their way back got as far as Arizona and stopped. They were people on the rebound. I hate to use the word symbolic, but it was an attitudinal or philosophical thing as well as just surviving in the landscape. It was beyond the literal.

Crist: When writing a piece of fiction set somewhere you’ve never been, how do you find out about the area? Similarly, when writing historical fiction, how do you research a place the way it was during the time in which the piece is set?

Gerard: I wrote a historical piece set in Cuba in 1898. I researched it by looking at a lot of old photographs and reading a lot of primary materials by people who were there at the time to find out what the place looked like, what the people looked like, what it smelled like, what the vegetation was like. But it is fiction after all, and the rule of fiction is that you’ve got to make the reader buy into it. There are writers that believe you can only do it authentically by really researching on the ground. I think that’s good to do, but I also think that as a fiction writer, you’re allowed to imagine. You’re not there to create the literal landscape so much as you’re there to create a work of art. I think you imagine your way into a setting.

As a corollary, I’ve often found that it’s really useful to be in a place different from the one you’re writing about. When I wrote about Cape Hatteras, I was living in the desert. When I wrote about the desert, I was living in Chicago. It’s always the case, with me at least, that you’re forced to imagine a place harder if you’re not there. You can’t just look out your window and say, “Oh yeah, there’s the beach.” You really have to remember. And what you realize is the stuff that impressed itself in your memory and imagination is stuff that’s likely to become those signature details that will catch your readers—the stinging breeze and sand particles flying through the air you feel in Cape Hatteras in a gale, or a certain quality of life you feel in the desert or smell in the air. Those are the things that linger with you and help you recall a place, and if you can capture that on a page, there’s every chance that your reader will feel them as well.

Writing about a place where you’d like to be is always fun. One of the reasons you write about places when you’re not in them is you long to be there. You always think about it in a certain way: my Cape Hatteras, not anyone else’s; my desert, not anyone else’s. They’re imbued with the things that I felt and did when I was there.

Crist: That’s similar to what you wrote in your essay “Down to the Sea” in Close to Home: Revelations and Reminiscences by North Carolina Authors. It suggests that creating place in fiction is subjective and personal.

Gerard: It is for two reasons. The first is that your own history with a place matters. When I lived in Cape Hatteras earlier in my life, I spent many days and nights outdoors, sleeping in a tent or in the open; I was imbued with nostalgia of that time and my love of the place, and it came out in Hatteras Light. The same could be true if a place were haunting and scary, or if you were in a terrible time your life.

The second reason creating place is subjective is that the story you’re telling demands that the place serves the story. Say you used to spend time at your aunt’s house when you were young, and she had this great big mansion, and you had a great time there. But you decide to write a ghost story and realize that that house would be the perfect place to set it. Somehow or other the spooky aspects of the story will have to overcome the cheerful childhood memories, because the story will demand that transformation. You may end up using the literal place but transforming the emotional context of it in order to serve the story.

Crist: Do you instruct your students specifically on creating place?

Gerard: Yes, we talk about it a lot. One thing I stress is to visit the places you write about whenever possible, and not just to see it but to use all of your senses. If you go to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, for example, the first thing you notice is that the air is spicy. Why? Because of the McCormick spice plant there. And if you were setting a story there, that could be a very useful thing to know and a very evocative detail to use. The smell of the salt breeze when you get out of an air-conditioned car on Wrightsville Beach is similar.

The other thing I emphasize is that when characters are acting, the landscape is a stage. They’re walking, enduring cold or heat, having to talk over noise, and it’s useful to really know their environment. When I was writing Cape Fear Rising, I walked the entire city of Wilmington to see how long it took to get from here to there. When the mob walks Seventh Street for four blocks, I want to know how long that takes so I can write it effectively. Also, are they walking uphill or downhill? Are people puffing for breath? If it’s a wet day, where’s the water running? I went out in the swamps in Smith Creek on a cold night to see what the temperature felt like. It’s cold out there, and that’s where African Americans were hiding during the height of the violence in 1898. I went to Oakdale Cemetery to find out why people hid there, and found out it was a great place to hide. There are bushes and berms. It would be hard for people on horseback looking for you to maneuver there. There are trees for protection from the weather. If you can get to your setting in the same conditions, it can teach you a lot, which is especially important for nonfiction.

Part of my research for a book included walking the fields of Gettysburg. In Pickett’s Charge, most people think it was a stupid thing to do for General Pickett and his men to charge up that hill. But when you’re there and looking across the land, it doesn’t look like much of a hill. It looks like a gentle slope, but when you start walking it, you walk down and get to a point when you can’t see the top of the hill anymore. You’ve gone down that deep, and then you have to climb up really steeply. You can’t see any of that from the starting point, though; it’s an optical illusion. It’s clear on the day of the battle those involved didn’t understand the terrain, but you can’t find that out except by walking it yourself.

I just recently spent time in Concord and Boston researching a book on Paul Revere. One thing I did was to walk about a five-mile stretch up and back of the old road where the British marched on the night they went to Lexington and Concord. I realized that it feels like a long way because it’s up and down hills and around blind curves, and they would’ve been utterly exhausted by the time they got there. That’s hard to know just by reading a historical account. It’s much easier when your own legs are throbbing and you’re looking for a visitor center. So it is important to get out there and experience it for yourself.

Crist: What can literature and creative writing offer to the study of geography?

Gerard: One thing they can teach us is that geography is not a static thing, that geography is a story, that place evolves over time. You see this even in the development of a forest. It starts out as maybe a burned-over stubble field, and then you get second growth which is all bush, and at a certain point a canopy grows up and it turns into something different. Over time a landscape changes and a place changes, but sometimes it’s dramatic, like in Indonesia with the tsunami when suddenly the coast looks much different. These changes can be very effectively expressed and explored in fiction and nonfiction.

From the human point of view, because we’re in so many places and so few places are left untouched by us, there’s usually a human story, and that, too, can be revealed very effectively through literature. Last spring I was in Alaska coming down the Inside Passage. The Tlingit Indians were there long before any Europeans discovered it. and each of their places has a story. There are places where events happened, where decisions were made, where cultures met, where battles occurred, where cultures changed. The landscape itself yields a story. In the most extreme cases, like battlefields—Gettysburg, for instance—you really do understand that there’s hallowed ground. But I think most places have that kind of a story about them, and I think that makes them fascinating. It’s one of reasons they’re worth preserving. I think a deep appreciation for a place, an understanding that a place is a deeply layered, textured thing, would help us from paving over everything, which is our tendency, and I would argue we shouldn’t do that. There are places worth preserving not just because they’re historically important but they’re particularly beautiful or have a value to the community. I think Americans probably don’t appreciate place because we have so much of it. I think we’re going to have to come to a different and a deeper appreciation of our land. It’s happening already in places that are built up now like New England, where there are fierce battles to preserve Walden Pond and tracts of forests. Similarly, Civil War aficionados want to preserve battlefields and don’t want to have condos built next to, say, the Manassas Battlefield. They’re appreciating that the place itself has character.

Crist: Do you have any tips for educators on using literature and creative writing to help teach geography?

Gerard: I would combine them all. I would have a class read, say, Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, and then take a field trip to Gettysburg to walk the ground, to feel the country in their legs. That would be good for urban geography as well, to have students walk in a city instead of always seeing it from a car or bus. I would try to pair stories with landscapes. There are wonderful stories out there, everything from John McPhee writing nonfictionally about geology to William Least Heat-Moon writing about the prairie to stories set in pretty much any community. Whether it’s Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier or Gap Creek by Robert Morgan, it would be good to go to the place and see its correlation to the story.

It’s always fun to be able to figure out where stuff happens in a book, especially fiction. You realize that the author conflated several locations or maybe made up a fictional town that’s really based on Oxford, Mississippi, like Faulkner did. One of the things you realize is that the character of the story comes out of the character of the place and the landscape very often. The story really couldn’t happen anywhere else. The stuff Faulkner wrote about just couldn’t happen in Boston or California.

Geography is one of the great undertaught, underappreciated subjects. I began to understand landscape when I studied archaeology and realized that it was no accident that we could predict where to find human remains—they were near water. Well, of course: the people needed water to drink and for access to fishing and transportation. When you begin to understand that, you start to read the land and get a whole different appreciation for it. I can walk along now and look at an undifferentiated landscape—farms, trees, roads—and tell you where the creeks probably are, what kinds of birds are there, where the deer are at a given time of day. That way, you begin to get a sense that there’s this living, breathing thing that’s the landscape—it isn’t just a hunk of rock or dirt out there—and that geography is much more fascinating than many of us realize.

Field trips may be part of the answer to a better appreciation of geography. I was at Moores Creek Battlefield recently to see a reenactment and was struck by how confusing the landscape is there, with its rolling lowland forest and swamp. I also realized why the battle took place there: it’s a bottleneck. A bunch of people needed to cross the creek in order to get to the head of the Cape Fear River, and if you know the landscape you can figure that out. Of course the Patriots did know the land and that’s why they were waiting there at that one little bridge for the Loyalist army. Geographically you see the inevitability of the battle once you understand the nature of the landscape.

I’ve been fortunate to do a lot of video work for public television in North Carolina involving aerial views. After a hurricane I was able to fly up the coast in a small plane at the tree top level and see the damage up close. You get a perspective of the land that you don’t get when you’re standing there in the middle of it, whereas up above it you can see the whole picture. By the same token, flying above the Cape Fear River, watching it meander, really teaches you a different appreciation for the complexity of the geography and just how fascinating it is. You begin to be able to read the landscape, and that’s when it becomes really fun.

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8Related Web Sites

"I Like Calling North Carolina My Home": Poems Created by 4th Graders
http://www8.chatham.k12.nc.us/project/rj/nchome.html

ERIC Digest: Using Literature To Teach Geography in High Schools
http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-4/high.htm

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