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Episode 152: Philip Gerard—Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Writer’s Magical Combination
132 Plays6 years ago
"For a writer, ignorance and curiosity are a magical combination," says Philip Gerard.
Philp Gerard, author of The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina and the novel Cape Fear Rising, returns to CNF to talk about his latest book.
Philip is a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has written several books. Visit philipgerard.com for more information.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod, and Instagram @cnfpod. Facebook @CNFPodcast.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support.
Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your pods!
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Transcript
The Magic of Ignorance and Curiosity in Writing
00:00:00
Speaker
for a writer, ignorance and curiosity together really are the magic combination.
Goucher College MFA Program Overview
00:00:08
Speaker
CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which is published 140 books and counting.
00:00:35
Speaker
You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published and Goucher College's NFA in nonfiction. Well, that sounds fun, right? So does this riff.
00:01:04
Speaker
Alright, well here we go again CNFers. This is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I talk to badass artists about the craft of telling true stories.
Introducing Philip Girard
00:01:13
Speaker
Today's guest is a repeat offender, first coming on the show for episode 38.
00:01:20
Speaker
Now it's episode 152. Welcome Philip Girard, author of the last battleground. The Civil War comes to North Carolina, published by University of North Carolina Press, and the novel Kate Fear Rising, published by Blair, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The book, the novel, they kind of piggyback off each other.
00:01:44
Speaker
always a pleasure having Phillip on the show. He's very insightful and one of the most interesting people I know. When I look at a life well-lived, I think of him. He's a man of many passions and he lives it, man. He really, really lives it.
Baseball Book Project: Progress and Challenges
00:02:01
Speaker
you know that several weeks ago i finished that significant draft of the baseball book had several beers in its honor delicious delicious sweet sweet beer got my edits back from my brilliant editor
00:02:18
Speaker
While some progress was made, while I harbored hope I was near the end, I am dreadfully in the messy middle. I'm treading water in the middle of a choppy ocean. I'm getting hit in the face with white caps. And what's that?
00:02:34
Speaker
That's a great white shark that symbolizes the terror of having to dive deeper and ask my dad painful questions that he will no doubt hate me for. Kill me now, Jaws. Kill me now. I mean, it's all good. I hate it when people complain about writing. I've been that person. I hate myself for it.
00:02:56
Speaker
there's plenty of worse things out there complaining is this weird kind of commiserating thing but it really doesn't do anybody any good and I'm not complaining I want to be clear I'm just a bit scared is all it's all tough and maybe it needs to be a novel and not a memoir but that feels cheap to me I don't know hey do you subscribe to the show go find it wherever you get your podcast just about wherever
Engagement and Promotion
00:03:23
Speaker
Join me on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara, and at CNF Pod. Share the show, tag me on social so I can jump in the fire with you. Instagram's at CNF Pod, and Facebook is at CNF Podcast. Visit BrendanO'Mara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading recommendations newsletter. Once a month, no spam. As far as I can tell, can't beat it.
00:03:46
Speaker
Reviews. Reviews are nice, man. And they just contribute to the overall packaging of the show. I have no idea if they elevate things, make it more visible. But what I do know is if someone stumbled across it and they see a lot of nice reviews, I don't know. They might download it. They might subscribe. They might join us, man. If you have a spare moment, please consider leaving one. Like this one by Winter Monk, titled Writer and Listener.
00:04:14
Speaker
I like this podcast so much, I'm a writer, and like another reviewer, I live in an isolated space, place.
00:04:22
Speaker
Some ways it's great, others it's lonely. This podcast helps with the lonely part and makes the great more great. These interviews are always absorbing, wide raging, thought provoking. Thank you, Brendan, for making this happen. That is freaking awesome. Thank you so, so much. This podcast was founded to appease my own loneliness and to grapple with my toxic resentments and jealousies. Leave a review and I just might read it on air.
00:04:53
Speaker
to give you cosmic fistbumps. Who doesn't like that?
Bay Path University MFA Program Details
00:04:56
Speaker
Hey, CNF is also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in creative nonfiction. There's a CNF for you. Discover your story. What? Discover your story. Bay Path University is the first and only university offering no residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction.
00:05:18
Speaker
attend full or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation of your memoir or collection of personal essays.
00:05:41
Speaker
Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland, with guest writers including Andre De Buthe III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others start dates in late August, January, and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA.
Philip Girard's Civil War Vignettes
00:06:06
Speaker
So like I said before, Philip Girard is here again. Check him out at PhilipGirard.com or check him out on Facebook. He's written several books, including one of my all-time faves titled, The Art of Creative Research, A Field Guide for Writers. I don't keep a lot of books, but I do keep this one. His latest book collection is just a bunch of great stories of Civil War vignettes that take place in and around North Carolina.
00:06:35
Speaker
It's a fantastic book that puts you on the scene in all its terribleness, sometimes funniness, sometimes heartwarmingness, but often gruesome. So join me in welcoming back to the show Mr. Philip Girard.
The Thrill of Discovery in Writing
00:07:04
Speaker
What brings me to the page is the sense that there's something that's going to be discovered down the road. That there's this great unknown. It's kind of like beginning a road trip out toward unfamiliar country. You don't know exactly what you're going to find, but whatever it's going to be, it's going to be really exciting. And somehow or other, you'll make it work.
00:07:23
Speaker
And for that reason, it's also terrifying, I should add, to sit there and decide to go on a project in the case of the Civil War book, The Last Battleground. That began as a conversation with a magazine editor who said, do you want to do a piece in the Civil War, like a narrative piece? And I said, well, I know nothing about the Civil War. I'm maybe the only white guy in the South who's not an expert on Civil War, you know. And she said, well, that's kind of, we want somebody who's sort of ignorant of it. And I thought that was sort of funny, but true, because I always think that
00:07:50
Speaker
for a writer, ignorance and curiosity together really are the magic combination. And if you can go out there and figure out what you don't know and then really try to find out what you don't know and get excited by it, then something's going to come together. So I think about that, you know, things that I really want to know about. When I'm in a project like The Last Battleground, what I'm doing in that book that was reported twice, the first time I did it was a series of magazine pieces or 50 of them.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I was sort of breakneck because I had no lead up time. I was sort of diving right in with about a month to get the first thing going. So instead of being able to spend a leisurely year or two getting set to go. So that turned out to be both a mixed blessing in a way because it wasn't my ideal way of starting a project.
00:08:33
Speaker
But on the other hand, as I was doing things and publishing them and they were sort of going live in the magazine on the website as I was working on the next one, all kinds of people contacted me with primary sources that were not available anywhere. I mean, these were shoeboxes full of old letters from some great grandfather who served in the Confederate Army or what have you. And one was a trove of love letters, which was perfect, you know.
00:08:55
Speaker
So that supplemental reading kind of came out of the blue. That was the world being kind to my project and developing a brand new archive along the way. So that was great. I read all the kind of Civil War experts, the people that I think were relevant to the things I was doing.
00:09:12
Speaker
writing about whether it was, you know, the songs and music of the Civil War or prison camps or the railroads or what have you. But I wasn't really looking at much creative work because I sort of wanted to do this as if I were reporting the war as it was happening outside, you know, going out there and pretending that I really was discovering it for the first time but trying to report back to some, you know, reported audience that didn't know what was going on and I'd be the the finder who was going out there in the field with the regimental surgeon
00:09:41
Speaker
or with the guy racing into the darkness on a hand car to try to find out what happened to his captured son and meeting a train head on, or the nurses at New Bern who were Sisters of Mercy. I was going into all those places figuratively, and in a real way, imaginatively through all those primary documents.
Story Structure in Civil War Narratives
00:09:59
Speaker
I must have read thousands of letters and diary excerpts and things that give you such a sense of immersion in it.
00:10:07
Speaker
that the story sort of becomes a retelling of their stories. The structure doesn't really enter into it much, although because of the nature of the first the series and the book being a series of individual stories that are knitted together through lots of kind of congruencies that they share, I didn't begin writing any of them until I kind of knew what my jumping off point was going to be.
00:10:30
Speaker
You know, and it's an old kind of journalism trick, get your lead first and then be able to build off of that. And discovering what the lead was, wasn't always easy. You know, sometimes it was very obvious, but other times not so obvious. Other times it was something that came much later in the process of trying to go through my notes. I would realize, oh no, the heart of the story lies here. It doesn't lie on the obvious thing. So there were discoveries all along the way. And I think I learned as much about, you know, reporting and researching.
00:10:59
Speaker
as I did about anything else I do in that book, certainly as much as I learned about the Civil War. So it was an education for me. Because there are so many, dozens and dozens of these very illustrative and evocative stories, did you find it a challenge that it was, because it wasn't just one continuous narrative following one set of characters, that it was hard to start and restart constantly throughout the whole process?
00:11:25
Speaker
Oh, it was like writing a little novel each month when I was doing the series. And then I had the leisure to spend another, I guess it was almost two years re-reporting things and I'd go back in because what would happen, having done it for four years, I knew things at the end of that time about the first pieces I'd done that I did not know. Then I discovered connections among family members or among geographical things that had happened or through lines that had not been apparent until I had written for a year and a half or something. And so I was able to go back.
00:11:55
Speaker
and have the leisure to reorder things, to rereport things that I needed to find out more about and just to sort of play up some of those connections that were going on. So that was, that's actually a really great luxury for a writer to have going from a serial medium into a book medium to be able to take something and say, okay, I got to be better at this. I learned a lot. And now to try to make this thing cohere, I can kind of look at what I have and start seeing connections that might not have been obvious before.
00:12:24
Speaker
And so one of the things we try to do in the book was to make sure that the rhythm of it wasn't such that there was a whole bunch of long pieces, then shorter pieces, that it wasn't all like grim, grim, grim, and then comic relief, that there was some mixture of tempo and texture going on in the book, which I think was true of the war, by the way. I think it mimics the war. There was a sort of stop-start nature of it. It would be terrible during the spring when things got going.
00:12:52
Speaker
really terrible during the summer and then by fall when the snow started falling and the northern reaches of Virginia and the mountains, things would slow down and in winter camp they'd be playing baseball and wrestling and cleaning their rifles waiting for the warm weather. So there was a sort of stop and start seasonal nature to the war itself, which we try to capture in the book. But mainly it came down to personal stories and never losing sight of the fact that these people really did not know how things were going to turn out in their lives.
00:13:21
Speaker
and they were on for the true and terrible suspense of that for the four years that the war lasted. Yeah, like speaking of that, what was illuminating for me in reading it was how you had people that were in their regiments, but then they would like basically go home for the weekend and help on the farm and then go back to the battles. Lucky not get captured instead up to a post and shot. Yeah, there was a lot of them flowing. One of the things that
00:13:50
Speaker
I learned early on with just about every fact that everybody reported to be as true in any book or source, you could find five other sources that would contradict that something as simple as how many men reported for duty on a given day.
00:14:04
Speaker
Well, that was a fluid thing because some of them were in sickbay. Some of them were deserted. Some had just not been counted because they didn't come back till after lunch. Some of them had been visiting their cousin over the next company over. Something as simple as how many people were there, who got wounded or killed, what their names were, how they spelled those names. Those things are up for grabs, let alone the more interesting questions of motive and the more complicated ways that people moved around.
00:14:32
Speaker
The astonishing thing to me was, one of them at least, was that this war lasted only four years. We've been in Afghanistan, what, 17, now going on 18? They had no mechanized vehicles. I mean, the US government had quickly consolidated railroads and gotten people moving around that way. In the South, not so much. I mean, they had some railroads, but they were pretty well.
00:14:54
Speaker
broken down by about 1863 or early 1864. So people walked, I mean, they walked where they were going and they covered thousands of miles. And they were often, if you were a regimental chaplain or a doctor or an officer, you might be going back and forth, you know, like a ping pong ball all over the place from Northern Virginia back to South Carolina, North Carolina. And it's incredible just how much movement there was in a day when you did not have modern transportation. So
00:15:23
Speaker
You know, those two things, being suspicious of every single fact somebody said they knew for sure, which is a great lesson for any nonfiction writer, and then realizing with some astonishment that we think of ourselves as being quite a mobile society.
00:15:38
Speaker
Boy, they were really putting on some miles. And also given that the North had such a technological and often technical advantage, in the course of your research, how surprised were you that the war lasted as long as it did? It was something of a surprise, but if you look at generalship and leadership and political will, I think that was the difference.
00:16:06
Speaker
I mean, the United States Army was superbly trained by McClellan, who was their first general in chief. And yet he was timid and really didn't believe that they should go to war with the South at all. He was constantly hedging. He was constantly asking for more troops. And in the end, he ran against Lincoln for president. And the idea was that if he won, he would make a separate peace with the South and they would keep slavery. So his heart really wasn't in it at the beginning. And that accounts for an awful lot.
00:16:34
Speaker
the fire-eating kind of battlefield generals that the Confederates had at the beginning of the war, people like Stonewall Jackson, even Joe Johnston, who ended up being part of the final chapter of the war. I mean, they were superb battlefield commanders. They weren't much on strategy. I mean, the whole war would have been very different had they fought it the way George Washington fought the revolution, which was always stay out of reach, keep your army in being, and don't care who has what city, just keep the army in being.
00:17:04
Speaker
that would have been a very different strategy and would have led the stalemate, which would have been then some kind of negotiated piece. But the other side of all the traveling was there was a terrific range of geography involved. I mean, all the way out to Texas and Tennessee and Kentucky, down south Louisiana, as far south as Florida, as far north as Gettysburg and places like that. So the geographical scale of this war was pretty immense for the day.
00:17:32
Speaker
And that accounts for partly why they did so much traveling, but also why it took so long to get some kind of a decision in the issue.
00:17:42
Speaker
In the course of your arranging of this, what was that process like for you as you were looking to iron out the helicopter view
The Editing Process: Reading Aloud
00:17:51
Speaker
of this book? How it was going to look as it all stitched together? Sure. The short answer is read everything out loud. This was the actual policy of the magazine that published everything. They sit around once a month and each editor reads out loud everything that that editor is going to put in his or her section of the magazine.
00:18:09
Speaker
And if they come upon, you know, clunkiness or unmusicalness, they get rid of it or they send it back to be edited or what have you. So that was very much on my mind with this book. And I was walking around the house a lot, you know, sort of talking out loud to myself. But actually what I was doing was reading drafts of things. And it helped to remember something we often forget about history, which is that it has a soundtrack. And the way the 1860 sounded was very different from the way
00:18:38
Speaker
our time sounds. I mean, there weren't all the noises of engines and airplanes and cars going by and highways, but there was a lot of the kind of creakiness of harness and wagons going by and the rumble of all that and the noise that ships made and so forth. But the tremendous noise of the war was another thing. And right along with that, something I've never seen portrayed in pretty much any movie or
00:19:07
Speaker
documentary about the Civil War, which is just how much music was going on. I mean, they use music for everything. It was entertainment, but it was also a way to get the troops up and about. The Reveley was actually much more complicated than a bugle call. It involved drummers and horn players and all the rest of it. And they used it for command and control. They would literally have bands playing regiments into action on the battlefield.
00:19:31
Speaker
And sometimes you'd have the opposing bands playing a real battle of the bands while the men were actually fighting right in front of them. And I mean, one of the most tearing audio images I have in my mind, if that's a word, was when Pickett's men had gone off and charged across that field, and it was really a whole lot of North Carolinians were among them.
00:19:53
Speaker
when they came back all bloody and so many of them were dead and the ones who could make it back were kind of limping back all bloody and broken and the regiment was completely destroyed, the division was destroyed. There was a band under the trees playing near my god to thee as they filtered back across the battlefield and I think, man, you can't make that up and it's just so heartbreaking.
00:20:14
Speaker
And, of course, in camp, they were singing every manner of body song. They were taking favorite songs and writing hugely dirty lyrics to it. So, it helped. One of the things I did was continually listen to a lot of players, Jay Unger and others who do Civil War era songs. And, you know, Weeping Sad and Lonely or LaRena or The Girl I Left Behind Me. And realizing what those songs meant when you were hearing them either on a battlefield or just after a battle or before a battle.
00:20:43
Speaker
or sitting around a parlor mourning some dead son or brother who never came home and trying to really live into the soundscape of that era. And I think and I hope that's reflected in the words that I chose to portray it and I think it's sort of it's almost soaked in that
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, and helping with that soaking in this material is that you employing the present tense to tell this because it gives us this immediacy that happened 150 plus years ago.
Using Present Tense for Immediacy
00:21:15
Speaker
So how conscious were you early in the process to make that decision to use that to bring us into these stories?
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, that was one of the first decisions. Present tense is not something that comes all that naturally to me. And I usually think of the past tense as being the default tense from writing most stories, because it feels like the present tense, the story, even though it's past. And for technical reasons, it's a lot easier to handle when you're looking at time completed before the action and so forth. But the idea was that this was really brand new, that I wasn't coming into this with the settled hindsight of historians. I spent their career studying this.
00:21:51
Speaker
And a lot of this was brand new to me and puzzled me and dazzled me and shocked me and, you know, depressed me and elated me and all those things. And the idea was to try to capture that immediacy. So that was an early conversation with the editors about just how we would do it. You know, that was a rule. Another rule was we were going to use North Carolina as a way of seeing the entire war that was going to be our lens. So one way or another, every story,
00:22:16
Speaker
is related to North Carolina, even if it happens in Gettysburg or Florida or wherever else, because that was our way of distilling this gigantic, complicated, sprawling saga into something we get our arms around. And the other thing was that we didn't care much about generals. I mean, they're in there. You can't really get away from them, but they're in there in a minimal way. And this isn't really about
00:22:40
Speaker
setting out sand tables and showing which regiment attacked whom on what day and so forth. This is really about trying to figure out from the individual's point of view what the war meant and try to capture the personal side of it.
Immersing Readers in the Civil War
00:22:52
Speaker
What was so great about reading this book too was the fact that you do, you work almost quite literally on the ground. You're not looking at these big picture thematic things. You're actually like smelling the rotting corpses on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg.
00:23:09
Speaker
and hearing the bone saw, you're like really put there and immersed in it. How conscious of you were that to really bring us onto the ground and really ground the story instead of having this big helicopter view of it? Well, I was very conscious of that and I always think when I'm writing a scene is, what are people feeling? Not just in a sense of their
00:23:36
Speaker
their emotional feelings, but what are they actually touching? What does the ground under them feel like to them? Are they wet? Are they dry? Are they comfortable? Are they too hot, too cold? And so I hung out with reenactors, and they demonstrated how they did a banded charge. They showed how they loaded their weapons. I got to feel the fabric of the cloth that they wore and see the shoes they wore. I actually handled the surgical implements that were a doctor who specialized in historical medicine
00:24:07
Speaker
And he brought out his kit and I was able to handle the bone saw, went to a museum where they actually have an amputated bone of a leg that was taken off at the battlefield at Aversboro. So I really kind of got down and dirty. And whenever I could, I went to the place where things happened and walked the ground, you know, whether it was Gettysburg or going over to the cemetery outside of Salisbury Prison, where all those soldiers were buried in mass graves for Fisher climbing up on the parapets where the final assault was made.
00:24:37
Speaker
you know, and really feeling it in your legs, feeling, breathing the air, feeling the temperature of the air, being there in the rain or the sun or what have you, letting the story really inhabit you in a way that you just don't get sitting in an office looking at papers.
00:24:53
Speaker
you really get a sense of that. And I wonder for you, when you were, say, had the bone saw in your hand, what was that experience like for you to have such a visceral connection to this implement that is just such a sort of gruesome part of the four-year conflict? It is. It's a special feeling. It's a privileged feeling.
00:25:21
Speaker
a little bit of a chill, you know, you handle a bone saw. And you know, it's because of its age has been one that has probably taken off, you know, hundreds of limbs in its day. The same as when you handle any kind of an old artifact, and you realize that this was a real part of a saga, you know, something happened with this. And, you know, I don't, I'm not a great believer in the occult, but I do feel that sometimes there is the kind of aura of what happened.
00:25:51
Speaker
or what a thing was used for or where a thing happened that you can't help but feel it. Maybe I just have an overactive imagination. But walking in the ground at Gettysburg in the early morning, watching the mist rise off of Cemetery Ridge, you sort of feel the presence of those ghosts there. You sort of feel like you get a different understanding of what it was like to walk across that field that day. And I did that up in,
Research Depth and Historical Artifacts
00:26:19
Speaker
at Kinston, at the battlefield there with a guy who specializes in recovering artifacts, and he's still finding them after all these years. And he was showing me how he could tell where a line of men stood, and it was that they had dropped bullets. These were unfired bullets, because they were standing there in the sleet, scared to death. They were firing up at an intense cannonade that was setting, you know, canister shot, which is like gigantic shotgun shells at them.
00:26:46
Speaker
And as these slippery pellets came out of their hands, they would drop them. And you couldn't use them without getting down on all fours and hunting around for them in the mud, then cleaning them off. And by that time, you're dead. So you can tell where each regiment stood by the line of dropped mini balls. And it's something that never occurred to me before. And in that sense, it captures just the fear and the weather and the absolute rigidity of the line. These guys stood there.
00:27:14
Speaker
all the while, you know, getting raked. And so that brings things home to you in a different way than reading about or looking at those charts which show battles of some kind of a chess game, you know, where the blue is here and the gray is there and they're always in neat regiments and so forth. It wasn't that way. It was pretty much chaotic from the moment the first bullet was fired and people were mostly scared to death and they mostly did it anyway.
00:27:39
Speaker
And you write early in the book that to understand the long march of events in North Carolina from secession to surrender is to understand the Civil War. And so in what way did North Carolina fully represent the totality of the war?
00:27:57
Speaker
In North Carolina, it turned out to be the perfect state if you were going to pick one. For one thing, it was a home front for a long time, but also a battleground. Part of it was occupied almost the entire war of the coast. It was never invaded from the north. It was invaded from the west, the east, and the south. At the beginning of the war, the white population, which was about 600 and so of the 900,000 who lived here, were evenly divided. In fact, they voted against having a secession convention the first time around.
00:28:26
Speaker
And the other third, of course, was enslaved African-Americans and so-called free people of color, 30,000 or so of them. And so fully two thirds of the population was not for this war, not for secession, not for the Confederacy. So it begins as divided as the nation was. It is the place where the great surrender of the war happened. 90,000 men surrendered from Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina.
00:28:51
Speaker
at the end of the war. So it becomes the place where the real final political end of the war happens, not Appomattox, which was weeks into the past by that point. It, of course, propelled Andrew Johnson to the presidency, who was a Raleigh native. So he was a North Carolinian. And you start looking at the tendrils of this and you realize it represents the division. It represents the sacrifice and the loss. It fielded regiments for both armies.
00:29:18
Speaker
it fielded black regiments, you know, freed slaves were in the U.S. colored troops as they were called in those days. And then they came back and liberated their former homeland. You know, they were raiding the plantations along the Neuse River. They came down and participated in the final assault on Fort Fisher. One of them captured his old master on the battlefield and led him away gleefully to the Holy Land. You know, so it's pretty much anything you want from that war,
00:29:45
Speaker
the infrastructure of it, the railroads of it, the medical part of it, the logistics of it. And even Sherman, his great march happened in the Carolinas. He always said that everybody was infatuated with the march to the sea, but it was child's play compared with the other, the other being the 450 mile march from Savannah to Goldsboro and then to the surrender. So, you know, it became, especially in the months that closed the war,
00:30:11
Speaker
the place where everything that mattered was happening. The Confederate government and exile was here. Sherman was here. The last great fort guarding the last seaport was here and falling. And the whole impetus for the African-American troops, the USCT colored troops were here. So it becomes this place where the whole thing collapses on one state and it happened to be North Carolina because of geography.
00:30:38
Speaker
Were you surprised that there wasn't more unrest among the soldiers, given that they were fighting a war for the exempt slave owners, essentially, who were exempt from having to be in the army, and that basically they were fighting for someone else's capacity to own hundreds of slaves on their plantations? Were you surprised about that?
00:31:07
Speaker
Yeah, very early on, Governor Zebulon Bass, who was this towering, mythical governor who had been the colonel of the 26th North Carolina, the most storied regiment in the army, wiped out at Gettysburg. He is made governor by acclimation, practically, doesn't even campaign. And the first words out of his mouth, practically, after the Confederate government exempts slave owners is, he says, this war is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. And there began a real frosty,
00:31:37
Speaker
rivalry between North Carolina and the government in Richmond. And in many respects, the North Carolina troops were always just as much at war with the Confederacy as they were with the US Army. And that continued throughout the war. And yes, the desertion rate rose, especially in the first flush of war. Everybody was like, yeah, yeah, we're going to go off. It'll be over in six weeks, as they always say, home by Christmas, the typical cliche. And when that became clear that that wasn't going to happen,
00:32:07
Speaker
You start getting letters from farmwives, and they're not only writing to their husbands, they're writing to the governor, which is why we have their letters because they've been preserved in the archives. And they're saying, send my husband home. The crops are rotting. My children are sick. We need him. The home guard, which, by the way, nobody ever had a good word to say about any of the contemporaneous sources. They're bothering me. They're trying to take away my land and so forth.
00:32:30
Speaker
And so as the war went on, more and more of the North Carolina troops were deserting from the Army of Northern Virginia to such an extent that Lee was completely up on arms about it, and his generals were constantly sending him memos saying, what are we going to do about these guys? And by late 1863, a lot of the Western counties in North Carolina had so many deserters that even the Provo Marshal wouldn't go in there, because these were armed groups of deserters who were not going to be taken back to the Army.
00:33:01
Speaker
and they basically stayed out there for the duration of the war. So yeah, there was a lot of that going on. There were a lot of guys who were conscripted, did their duty, and at the same time moved heaven and earth to keep their younger brothers or sons out of the war. So yeah, there was not this sort of monolithic, let's go fight for the Confederacy feeling. There were a lot of people in there with very mixed motives, a lot of conscripts, a lot of desertion.
00:33:29
Speaker
And at the end of the war, it became a real slaughter as they began executing deserters in such numbers. They would either find them or men would come back from their visit home. They would execute them anyway as a warning to others. And all this did was actually increase the desertion rate. So it was a problem, yeah. And there was the one guy, what was it? Scape Gallows was his nickname. He survived the hanging. And then he had to go fight again.
00:33:59
Speaker
He also went about hunting down everybody who had done him wrong. The other thing that I had not realized was the war in the western mountains was very much like what it had been during the revolution when the revolution in the south was the revolutionary war was fought mainly by Americans fighting other Americans, Tories versus patriots, very few British troops were actually involved. And that became the case
00:34:25
Speaker
in the mountains, you had all these sort of malicious home guards, self-styled unionist mobs and whatever. And depending on what county you're in and who your relatives were, you might be burned out by unionists or Confederates, you might be assassinated. It was a real dirty kind of feuding warfare. And I suspect in what seems to be true from the record is an awful lot of it was settling old feuds.
00:34:50
Speaker
Now there's a war on, we get to shoot the people we've always wanted to shoot under cover of their confederates and we're a unionist or vice versa. Over the course of you assembling all these stories, who were some of the characters that you were just really entertained and surprised that you stumbled across over the course of your research?
Uncovering Intriguing Historical Figures
00:35:12
Speaker
Well, I loved Abraham Galloway. He's getting more famous now because historians are finally paying attention to him.
00:35:19
Speaker
But he's this illiterate guy. He's born a slave on the lower Cape Fear, lives in Smithville, which is now Southport. Escapes goes up to Philadelphia, becomes part of the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement. He starts doing all kinds of very clandestine work on behalf of the Underground Railroad, going as far as Canada. When the war breaks out, he comes back to North Carolina. He becomes like the fixer, the go-to guy at the Freedmen's Colony at Roanoke Island, where they were congregating all the liberated black slaves.
00:35:49
Speaker
And basically tells the Union Army, you can't enlist these people unless you give them my terms. And that included things like educating their children while they were gone, feeding their wives and the families while they were gone, making sure they got paid as much as the white soldiers got paid. And the crucial one, which was never actually observed in the event was that if these black troops were captured, they would be treated as prisoners of war and not as escaped slaves. And of course, the Confederacy's policy was
00:36:17
Speaker
shoot the white officers that are commanding black troops and send the black troops to slavery. And so that they were, but that was out of the control of the Union Army to do. So that was someone, Rose Greenhouse, who was a spy for the Confederacy was the society matron living a few blocks from the White House in Washington. And it has this incredible saga where she's
00:36:40
Speaker
captured by Alan Pinkerton, the famous detective who's literally standing. He's got two of his guys boosting him up to her window on a rainy night, watching her have a tryst with a union officer, and him giving her plans, which turned out to be the plans for the what becomes known as the Battle of First Manassas Bull Run. And she is credited with helping that bring off that first grade Confederate victory. She's captured by Pinkerton
00:37:07
Speaker
They put her in jail. They can't figure out quite what to do with her. They finally have to let her out. And even while she's in jail, first under house arrest and later in the capital prison, which was apparently a real hellhole, she's still busy sending out coded notes to her compatriots and giving away information. So finally, they let her go. They send her back south. And so she's no longer able to be a spy successfully because they know who she is. She goes to Europe, writes a book there about her captivity.
00:37:37
Speaker
sells it, and brings back the gold that she made from her royalties on a fast blockade runner. And then at the mouth of the Cape Fear River on a dark and rainy night, they run aground. And she insists on being set ashore, even though the weather's worsening, because she does not want to go back to prison. They think there's the US Naval blockade is coming down on them. And so she goes into a boat, but she's got this bag of gold chained to her, and she's wearing a heavy dress.
00:38:06
Speaker
The boat capsizes and they rescue everybody in the boat with her as she washes the shore for Fisher. And one of the women commented at her funeral, what a sad thing it was. Nobody grieved for her because she died in a place where no one knew her name. I liked, you know, Julius Lineback, the musician. There's this great Moravian brass band out in the Salem area. And he comes to realize he's working as a bookkeeper at one of the mills out there and he decides
00:38:36
Speaker
that everybody's getting conscripted. And he says in his diary, I didn't want to shoot anybody or get shot at. And so I can contrive this plan to enlist as a musician. So they get the whole band to enlist. His brother becomes their arranger and they become the most famous band in the whole Confederate army. And in fact, they're General Lee's favorite band. They're actually let out of the regiment to come back and play for Governor Vance's inaugural. And at the end of the war, they're all captured.
00:39:03
Speaker
And most of them lose their instruments. They come back home. But the one thing that they bring back home is the sheet music, all the arrangements. So they were the only Confederate band to do so. And now it's all at the Moravian Music Society. So if you ever hear a reenactor band playing those old Confederate songs, you know, the Bonnie Blue Flag or what have you, they're all those arrangements. That's the only ones that are left.
00:39:25
Speaker
And so they actually contributed something amazing to the archive and how they kept that through their capture, captivity and subsequent repatriation is a small miracle in itself, but they did. You know, they were musicians and they weren't going to let their songbooks go. So those are some of the favorite characters. And I just love the fact that most of the ones I like were not all that connected to the fighting. You know, they were doing something. Thomas Fanning Wood was a surgeon.
00:39:56
Speaker
And to start with, he's just a guy working in a pharmacy. He witnesses his first shooting when a bunch of University of North Carolina ruffians come down and have a fight with a proprietor and a gun fight erupts right in the middle of this pharmacy. And the proprietor is so badly wounded, he has to become the pharmacist for a while. And from there becomes interested in medicine. And by the time he enlists as a private soldier,
00:40:22
Speaker
The only way he gets to a hospital to study medicine is by coming down with fever because he drank money water out of a wheel run. And that gets him to a hospital where a doctor sees his potential and trains him up. And pretty soon he's right there in the battlefield, sawing off arms and legs with the best of them. Also the kind of unlikely trajectories of some of these people that started out in very obscure ways and then wound up being important way beyond maybe what they'd ever expected.
00:40:48
Speaker
And there was the conjoined twins? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was wild, too. And then when you really start unpacking the relationship and the fact that they both had separate families and all this, in a way, your imagination starts working, and you're like, whoa, this is kind of weird. Well, it was the scandal of the day when Cheng and Engbacher settled. They were so tired of touring, and they were so worn out by it. And they were men of great dignity.
00:41:17
Speaker
And they decided they wanted to be in a place where they'd be treated that way. And they were invited to come to North Carolina by someone they met while they were on tour. They came, they loved it. They bought a house, subsequently bought another bigger place. Then they bought a farm and built two houses on it so that they could each have their family for three days. And the deal was three days at one, then they get on a buggy and they go three days at the other. And the family stayed, but the guys moved. And so at any given time,
00:41:44
Speaker
you always had in the marriage bed, you always had three people hanging in one of the other of their wives and they had a huge number of children. But when they moved south and declared their allegiance to the Confederacy, they were slave owners and their wealth was tied up in slaves. Another thing that I think most people don't realize is that at the start of the Civil War, the greatest economic asset in the US was slaves. There wasn't railroads or factories or farmland or shipping.
00:42:14
Speaker
It was slaves. And so their wealth was tied up in slaves. And they were ruined by the war to such an extent that they had to go back on tour after the war. It really broke their health. And what I love is they had both been tested by many doctors over the years. And they had the same pulse, same heart rate. And as the war ended and they had to go back on tour, that changed. And they no longer had the same heart rate and the same pulse.
00:42:42
Speaker
They were growing physically different in ways that were sort of dangerous. And then when one of them had a stroke, the other one lies there thinking, you know, he's dead, now what do I do? It's a very tragic, strange, and heartbreaking personal story that comes out of the war. When did you, over the course of your research, stumble upon Nat Ramer as one of the first war correspondents, who was actually a soldier too?
00:43:11
Speaker
What I loved about that was that being a writer, of course, I was very interested in how the war was written. And my students are always fond of saying, well, just look it up, see what's in the newspaper about it. And I'm always saying, but yeah, that may not be the best, most accurate record. The papers were reporting that Atlanta had fallen two weeks before it did. They were reporting that Sherman had been assassinated. There's all kind of wild stuff that shows up in the newspapers.
00:43:37
Speaker
And what I loved about him, and he was like, most of the Confederate correspondents were actually in the army. And they were writing letters back home to their local newspapers or to some trusted person to be published in a local way. And his were then copied by other newspapers. But one of the things he was very careful to do was to enumerate the casualties, who was wounded and killed where and, you know, what their prognosis was and send all that home in a time when
00:44:04
Speaker
And it astonished me to figure this out, but there was no official notification of next of kin for anybody in either army. If your son was died or missing an action or wounded, there was nobody to send any notice back home to let them know that that had happened. And if you were lucky enough that a friend happened to be on furlough going home and could tell the news to your family, that was great. But so one of the things Raymer was doing was this amazing service, especially in the Confederate army when there were very few correspondence.
00:44:32
Speaker
With writing a book of this nature, do you find that this type of book that you find that you like dealing in dead people versus writing stories with live people?
Writing Historical vs. Living Figures
00:44:48
Speaker
Well, one thing is they don't sue you very regularly. I think to some extent it is less complicated because whatever record you have is what you have. They're not going to do anything new.
00:45:02
Speaker
And so, you know, you're not going to write something and then feel regret that they've changed and now they've got a second act in their life. You can't, you know, take cognizance of. And you're not personally involved except in the way that emotionally, you know, their story moves you, but you're not, there's not a real time element. You know, everything has been settled. Whatever is going to happen has already happened. And that gives you a kind of tranquility, I guess I'd call it, in writing about them.
00:45:32
Speaker
that you can ponder it at your leisure. It's not like covering a murder trial like Truman Capote covering the trial in Kansas, where there's an outcome and so much depends on it. What will it be? And in real time, there are all kinds of emotional questions and legal questions coming up. When you're writing historically, you have the sense that the issues have been settled and yet probably don't understand what that settlement exactly was or what it meant.
00:46:00
Speaker
And so one of the jobs is to bring a new eye to this stuff and say what exactly happened there. And a lot of the conventional wisdom turns out not to really hold true. A lot of it seems to be a simplification. And just learning the fact that North Carolina was so divided, and it wasn't the only state that was divided, you know, it was West Virginia for a reason.
00:46:21
Speaker
It takes the kind of black and whiteness out of it. And you realize so much of it occurs in that middle ground of nuance where people's motives were complicated and their actions were complicated and difficult to sort out. And anybody who thinks that they can give you the clear eyed view of exactly what was happening in any given day is putting you on. You know, there's a lot that will never quite be known. I mean, I think there's still bodies at Gettysburg that will come to light.
00:46:47
Speaker
some farmer will be digging something to put a new foundation in and find them because there were so many that were never recovered of the thousands who fell. So there's still a lot of archives that are almost literally buried from that war and we'll learn more about them in the years to come.
00:47:04
Speaker
Given the amount of research you did for this book and the entire series, how are you going about organizing the research and organizing the notes so you could access it and have a full complement of tools to write these stories?
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I typically, and for this project, certainly kept both an electronic file cabinet and a real file cabinet where I have a drawer with folders level, you know, that are labeled for every person or every event that I was writing about. And as I would find stuff, I would, you know, if I have photocopies of it, I put it in the hard copy. If I had electronic copies or facsimiles or links or what have you, I'd put them in the electronic file.
00:47:48
Speaker
And then when I was writing, I would be able to pull out all that stuff and then also cross reference because it would turn out that when you're writing about Gettysburg, that was a touchstone for so much of what happened. So many of the people I wrote about in other regards wound up there. And so, you know, you can you can kind of cross reference and check things. But yeah, keeping it straight. I always tell my students here, if you can't find it, you don't have it. I don't care. You know, you get this great document if you put it away somewhere and you can't find it.
00:48:17
Speaker
then it may as well be in the wind because you don't have it. So that level of organization and the challenge of it certainly was one of the big challenges of doing that project. And it did help that I started it off as a series so that I was doing kind of one at a time and accumulating them and then had the leisure to go back and reorder and recombine and so forth. Had I started the other way, it might have been a little more difficult.
00:48:42
Speaker
And what was the – and this could apply to any project. What kind of daily routine or daily rituals do you employ to work on these projects and thread them in around all the teaching you do as well? Well, I'm very good at compartmentalizing for the most part. So if it's a teaching day, I'm generally not writing.
00:49:02
Speaker
And on my writing days, I'm not answering my email from students or from other entities. What I'm trying to do is to say, I've got this time, and I actually literally would schedule it out on my electronic calendar and say, okay, on this day from three to seven, you're writing, or on this day, you're visiting this battlefield and taking notes. And I wouldn't start writing about anything until I had done two things, until I had accumulated a lot of material that I thought was really gonna be
00:49:30
Speaker
the meat of it that I could use. Not that I might have everything yet, but that I had enough to get started, and that I had my way into the material. You know, that I could write about railroads because I could write about one man who was killed in a bizarre railroad accident, who happened to be the pivotal railroad guy in the Confederacy at that point. But he was on that hand car racing in the dark across a bridge, being a locomotive head on in the dark because he was trying to find out about his son. So ultimately, it was a father.
00:49:59
Speaker
trying to figure out what was happening to his son. And that was my way into railroads. And the same was true for many other of the stories. I didn't just want to have a generic, you know, kind of overview. So even writing about Chang'e and Bunker, the Siamese twins were so famous, I think I started out that by writing about the descendants of Paul Revere. You know, two of them died, one of Gettysburg, and I think one of the other was at Antietam, if I'm not mistaken. So that
00:50:29
Speaker
to kind of get the idea that yeah, famous people and the descendants of famous people were involved in this too. And sometimes you get notoriety for being the first guy killed, even though you're obscure. And sometimes you get notoriety because you're already coming from an illustrious family, and then you meet this tragic heroic end. And that becomes part of the story. So once I had a bulk of material, once I had a way into the story that I thought was going to stand up, it was not the typical way. And then I would start writing about that. And then
00:50:58
Speaker
typically try to let it sit, come back to it, let it sit, come back to it so that it wasn't just done in one big rush and then shipped off. And of course with the leisure making into a book, I had the agonizing process of going to do it all over again and find out all the places where I felt like I'd followed short and see what I could do about those.
00:51:18
Speaker
When you feel overwhelmed or maybe unfocused, what are you doing to maybe get yourself back on track and make sure that you don't get too swamped in the glut of material you have? Yeah, I mean, I work in a little office here, or I close the door when I start to work. The only one allowed in here with me is my dog, Daisy Duke. She's an Australian Shepherd.
00:51:42
Speaker
And when she's had enough and wants to go out, she'll come nuzzle my leg and we'll go out. I have a little door off the office under the back deck and under the backyard, which fronts on Whiskey Creek. And we'll go out there and play around for a while and just kind of clear the air, clear my head. And that I find is good. And then, you know, I guess staying focused is sometimes putting it away and saying, you know, this is just, I'm overwhelmed today. And one of the things, by the way, that ambushed me a bit on this project was, especially as time went on,
00:52:13
Speaker
especially going back over it and turning into a book with the whole thing before me, was that I came away feeling a real kind of emotional attachment and almost a kind of a grief about this.
Emotional Weight of Civil War Research
00:52:23
Speaker
I mean, in certain ways, it really weighed on me. And I had to come to terms with that. And that was something I had not expected. You know, you expect that when you're writing about, say, a school shooting or something, you know, current, but writing about something that happened 150 years ago, you don't expect
00:52:40
Speaker
to really feel kind of an emotionally heavy heart over the whole thing. And yet I would read these stories and sometimes it would break my heart and I would just find myself like, okay, I need a break from this. I need to go do something fun and go into the music room and play the guitar for a while or, you know, call up a friend or go for a walk in the park with a dog or something.
00:52:59
Speaker
Yeah, you wrote in the afterword about that kind of grief that the war should have settled the matter of equality once and for all, but it didn't. So that probably played a significant part.
00:53:17
Speaker
a large phenomenon like the Civil War, from a point of view of a writer, you're trying to be analytical and intellectual about how you're understanding it. You're also getting caught up in the emotion of it. And one of the things that keeps on happening is you keep seeing decision points. When this person could have decided to do A or B or C, and they did D, and that made the difference. And you see little decision points where someone decides to enlist or not, and that changes their fate, but maybe it doesn't change the world's fate so much.
00:53:46
Speaker
But after the war, you know, in the surrender, you see this amazing thing happening with, you know, Joe Johnston, this, you know, crusty Confederate general often called the best battlefield commander of his age. And General William Tecumseh Sherman, who's nobody's idea of a sentimental fool, you know, he said of the burning of Columbia, I didn't order it. But, you know, I have no regrets about it because it shortened the war, basically. But they become friends.
00:54:11
Speaker
And they actually craft. And it's Sherman's idea, you know, with Ulysses Grant's backing to be humane and to treat his foe with the kind of humanity that will allow them to go back to their lives and not to be full of recriminations and to try to keep the world from getting any worse than it already is. And they actually become fast friends although they never met until the surrender. So you see that and then you see what happens with reconstruction when you have this wonderful plan
00:54:38
Speaker
to actually give some of that plantation land to the Black slaves who worked there for so many generations. And that's all scuttled by Andrew Johnson and his administration. And so they missed this opportunity to change the entire future of race relations in America. You know, the stuff we're dealing with now would not be the same thing if you had, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Black families with legacy wealth because they owned land in the South after the Civil War.
00:55:08
Speaker
But instead, they're let out of bondage, but they're completely penniless, completely broke with no infrastructure, not even any family bonds, because often the families have been broken up in the course of commerce of selling slaves. So you see missed opportunities. You see people doing this thing instead of that thing. And that's sometimes the most heartbreaking, that there was an opportunity to do something and they missed it. You know, it was easy to say, yes, Arafetti never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
00:55:35
Speaker
And see that again and again with especially the Confederate government. But you see it, you see a lot of it everywhere. And then every so often, you just see people step up. You know, I love the Sisters of Mercy. You know, they're arriving at Beaufort at this old beat up hotel that's been looted. And there's this, you know, crusty old, you know, Union Sergeant who's in charge of the hospital and he's worthless. And they just go in and they remind me the nuns they went to school with.
00:56:02
Speaker
They just took charge. They booted him out. They demanded from the general that they be in charge. He said, fine. They demanded that if they didn't get their supplies, they were going to walk. They got all their supplies. And they turned this hellhole into a place of healing and hope. And without being sentimental, the men were long after the war writing about what these wonderful women had done for them, how they not only saved their lives, but had given them back their manhood, their humanity. And it was soldiers of both armies.
00:56:33
Speaker
They even got thanked by Robert E. Lee at the end of the war for their service. So, I mean, there were people who stepped up and did things which just warmed the heart. And you think, that's real bravery. And then there were those missed opportunities. So, it's those decision points. And when you step back from a phenomenon, as opposed to when you're right in the middle of it, you can see those decision points a little more clearly. And you can see how things might have been different had this happened instead of that, had this choice been made, and not the other thing.
00:57:00
Speaker
And of course, The Last Battleground is a prequel of some sort to the novel Euro Cape Fear Rising.
00:57:08
Speaker
I'm interested, you were someone who writes novels and narrative non-fiction, also craft books, but I wonder what is the mental discussions you're having with yourself and maybe outwardly with colleagues about, all right, this story, it might be better told as a narrative non-fiction piece, but this one is specifically Cape Fear Rising. This one needed to be a historical novel.
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah, Cape Fear Rising was interesting. I was doing mostly fiction in those days, so my first kind of instinct was to do it by fiction. And I had several ways I was going to do it. One was to write the trial of Alfred Moore Waddell. Alfred Moore Waddell was the white supremacy leader who led the thousand man or so mob that burned the daily record, the African-American newspaper, and led what essentially turned into a killing spree.
00:57:59
Speaker
that killed an untold number of black citizens and overthrew the government. He became mayor. I couldn't make that work. I couldn't make that structure work. And then I thought, well, I want to write it as a nonfiction book, and it'll be like me coming to Wilmington, finding all this stuff out. And that just started to seem too much like about me. So I thought, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have someone who represents the kind of person I might have been back then, although I made this person deliberately
00:58:26
Speaker
I made him a drunk. I made him someone who was a failure. I didn't want him to come in with a moral high ground. I want him to be in a place where he had his last chance. And that would consist of going along with the program or speaking out and taking a moral stand against it. And so from the very beginning, I set a couple of rules for myself, one of which was any public event. If there was a speech, if there was a massacre, if there was a demonstration of a Gatling gun on the river, which happened to scare the bejesus out of black citizens.
00:58:54
Speaker
And then I would write that as historically accurate as I could, as if I were writing it as nonfiction. And I would use the viewpoint characters. There were 70 or so, as I'm recalling, were involved in it. And I couldn't use all those people in a novel. So I tried to pick the ones who seemed at the center of things on both sides. And then I wanted characters who would represent those people who left behind no voice, the housekeeper, you know, the working person.
00:59:19
Speaker
of the itinerant black preacher who was preaching a more firebrand version of liberation that perhaps was polite in those days, but who left no name in the record and tried to give characters a voice that would, or make characters that would give them a voice. But I was very true to the history of it. And in the 25 years it's been in print, I've never had any historian question any of, you know, the outline of events as I've presented them. The biggest outcry was that I used the names of real people
00:59:49
Speaker
as historical characters, much in the same way as, I would argue, Jeff Shara or Michael Shara used Robert E. Lee's name in his book about the Battle of Gettysburg, the novel, The Killer Angels. I mean, there's a great tradition in historical novel writing for doing that. But that was my ethic to try to present it as accurately as I could and to really bring readers into the idea that it's not just a presentation of these actions,
01:00:15
Speaker
a real moral question at the center of it that has to do with storytelling and writing and how you tell the truth. And oddly enough, in this day and age, what the role of a journalist is, because he's a newspaper reporter, Sam Jenks, my character. And I thought, after it came out in 1994, and I thought, well, OK, even though it was not much admitted around here, it's out now, and the story's out, and certain things happened because of it, I never dreamed that 25 years later, I would see
01:00:44
Speaker
you know, white supremacist Nazis with torches and guns marching in the streets of Charlottesville, or a Klan rally in North Carolina celebrating the election of a certain president, or the kind of hate that's been directed toward people of color of all kinds, the vilification of reporters. I mean, this, so the book turns out to be extremely relevant. It's almost as if it could be happening yesterday.
01:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, that echoes the similar grief that you wrote about at the end of The Last Battleground, too, that these things that you thought were put to bed in our dusty and artifacts of another era, our every bit is sort of prescient in what we consider an enlightened time. Yeah, and there's a line in the book that the priest, Father Denon, who was a real character, a real feisty fighter for writing justice, he says, if you don't tell the story in its truth, you'll relive it over and over again. Don't you see that?
01:01:39
Speaker
And I think that's kind of it. I think there's a little bit of a mythology that, oh, white supremacy is sort of a fringe thing that happened. And it's just a few people, but really the people in the South who fought the Civil War were noble and honorable. And really, if you unpack it, you realize that, no, white supremacy is foundational to the entire economy of the South. It's the whole plantation economy. And even if you didn't own slaves, you basically were subscribing to that ethic
01:02:08
Speaker
Even the religions were subscribing to it I mean every major Christian religion except for the Catholics pretty much split over the issue of slavery before the war So since you've never really addressed that we've never really gotten to the bottom of it as a foundational thing It simply goes underground, but it remains a very virulent kind of infection that is still very much present in our in our society and now because it's been given permission again and
01:02:38
Speaker
It's almost like measles coming up because people are afraid to get vaccinations because of some oakum they read on the internet. The whole doctrine of white supremacy is now out in the open because it's being given political cover by the Republican Party. And I think that's dangerous. And I think it goes to show that we're still fighting the Civil War in some important sense. And 1898 was maybe the last big battle of the Civil War. There are still some other ones that are being fought.
01:03:06
Speaker
And what has to be said, too, is that when you wrote this book, it threatened your tenure at the University of Wilmington, too. Yeah, I was naive. I was an untenured assistant professor, and I found out the story, and I couldn't believe nobody ever told it, especially as a novel.
01:03:25
Speaker
since the turn of the century when Charles Chestnut had written a book called The Marrow of Tradition, which is a good novel, but somewhat different and actually not as accurate, I think, as mine turned out to be in terms of the events that happened. But I did not really, I thought, okay, this happened at that point almost 100 years ago. It was like 96 years old, the story.
01:03:46
Speaker
And I didn't really anticipate the kind of backlash and reaction I would get. And it turns out that the board of trustees at our university, there were a number of the descendants of those families on it. And they were going to deny my tenure. And Owen Keenan, who's also descendant of one of the people involved in it, he was the one who stood up for me. And after the chancellor had been sort of argued down
01:04:10
Speaker
He was the one that said, no, you can't do this. You've got the grant and tenure on the merits. And I didn't know this for, I've been here 30 years. I found this out like last year. So it's sort of like growing up and then finding out, oh, by the way, but you were adopted, those aren't your real parents. I mean, it's kind of a soul shaking thing to realize that, because you have tenures up or out, they either, they either promote you or they fire you. And so to realize that was the abyss I was dancing on. And that was how the leadership of the university
01:04:41
Speaker
Uh, kind of reviled me at that point. It, um, it sure gives you pause and then you find yourself kind of rewinding everything and saying, well, okay, this other decision, I didn't get that. Or when I asked for this and I was up for that job and then get it, you know, what, what was it play? Was it simply coincidence? Was it irrelevant? Or was there any connection?
01:04:59
Speaker
So how do you think it had you known that your career down there might have been threatened? Do you think that would have changed your approach to writing the book or writing it at all? I like to think not. I mean, I think knowing enough about myself, I think it might have made me dig in harder, but it also might have made me do some things preemptively.
01:05:24
Speaker
to make it clear that I understood this and kind of put people on notice that I was going to be paying attention to this. I was the sort of babe in the woods, you know, I was young and tenured and new to this and happy to have this job, everything. But I'd like to think that I just would have been stubborn enough to do it. I think in some ways it helped being a newcomer, getting a story without all the gloss of the gauzy family memories or the
01:05:51
Speaker
the folklore and mythology that has grown up around it in various communities. And maybe it was also liberating not to be aware of the ways in which this might play out because I didn't have to keep on second guessing myself as I wrote. I just wrote the best book I could with the best information I could find over a year of research and trusted that that would be enough.
01:06:16
Speaker
And I want to read this great quote that you gave in a recent interview you did. You said, so my advice is to be curious about things that matter. Research relentlessly to dispel your own ignorance, find out the truth as best you can, then write to discover what you have learned. Write what is in your heart. If you can, find someone who believes in you to stand by you, a loved one, a friend, an editor.
01:06:41
Speaker
Remember, if you're not possessed by the story, if you're not losing sleep over it, if you can't feel the heat of the fire in your pen, you're not doing it right. That is just such a powerful paragraph. Can you just elaborate on that and speak to where that comes from for you? Sure. I find myself writing not just this book, but any project based on things that I lie away thinking about at night.
01:07:09
Speaker
And then when you're writing about real people in nonfiction or writing a historical novel in which you have real people, you do second guess yourself. You're thinking, have I been fair? Have I really presented this in a way that honors the, you know, the objective reality that I know from the documents I've seen or the whatever other evidence I've seen. And of course, it's more it's most urgent when you're writing about living people because you know what you write may have an effect on their lives. And so you're you're always sort of tossing and turning a little bit about that.
01:07:38
Speaker
But in the end, you figure out, you kind of wrestle with your conscience, you go back, you look at the thing you added, what have you. The matter of the fire in your panel, I really feel, when I started in Cape Fear Rising, I was so possessed by that story. I was dreaming at night. And I wrote about this in another essay, but it was about, I'd have the same dream, and the dream would be, I'd be walking the streets of Wilmington, but it would be an older Wilmington lit by gas lamps.
01:08:06
Speaker
Nobody'd be on the street but me. I'd come to this corner store, you know, with a kind of corner entrance to it, and there'd be a little light showing out of the door, and I'd kind of push the door open and walk in, and there'd be a back room that was half-opened, and light coming from there, this little kind of sliver of light from the half-opened door. And I would go in there and realize that all these guys in black suits were sitting around a table talking, and what they were doing was plotting.
01:08:31
Speaker
And I realized that they were doing that and also they could not see me. And so I became a kind of a eavesdropper. I would just stand there and listen to them. And and so I was imagining the thing so deeply. It was actually in my dreams at night, you know, over and over again. And I began to really feel like I understood. And of course, I would walk the city. I would go down to the place where things happen and walk time myself. How did it take to get from this place to that place where things happened? You know, I'd go out there in different weathers.
01:09:00
Speaker
and really let the thing inhabit me and, you know, at a certain point you realize, you know, this thing has got me and I've got it and we're going to finish it because I can't let it go and it hasn't let me go yet, you know. But you really do feel that. I felt that as I got into the Civil War series almost at the very beginning. I was writing about what was called the power of the, there was parading off to war and they were talking about the flags and the regiments
01:09:30
Speaker
and about the sheer naivete. And the regiment I wrote about was actually a company of 180 young boys from Guilford, North Carolina. And they came back and there were something, I think at the end of the war, there were 13 of them that had not been killed or seriously wounded out of 180. And yet they're marching off with these glorious flags. And I just, I got it from that very first thing. I got it. This is what was happening. Lives are going to go out there and forever be altered.
01:09:58
Speaker
And from that on, it became a kind of historical detective story going out there to report this thing and just see where it would lead you and to start looking into the great mystery of why these people did what they did. Well, they're amazing books. Philip, thank you so much for your time. And where can people maybe find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it?
01:10:22
Speaker
They can go to PhilipGirard.com. They can go to my Facebook page. They can go to Blair, which published Cape Fear Rising, just B-L-A-I-R. They have their own website and Facebook page. And they can go to UNC, University of North Carolina Press. And there's actually a neat little trailer that's up now on the Blair website for Cape Fear Rising that features some historical photos and a song that I wrote and perform in the video.
01:10:49
Speaker
that has to do with the events of 1898. Awesome. I'll be sure to include all that in the show notes and also link up to it so people can dig in more. But this is great. Thanks for coming back on the show, Phil. A ton of fun getting to hear your approach to all this stuff. And I deeply appreciate the time. Hey, my pleasure. And thanks so much for your patience while I got my technical issues working out. It was well worth the wait. I really appreciate it.
01:11:17
Speaker
Always good times, right? You want to hear progress, go check out episode 38 and then listen to this one. That's the power of investment, baby. Investment in your technology. Anyway, thanks to Philip for coming back on the show. He needs to be a once a year guest, at least once a year.
01:11:34
Speaker
Thanks to Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for supporting the show. And to you, the listener, for downloading, subscribing, and being one cool cat. Be sure to share this episode and others with your fellow CNF-ers. And be sure to keep the conversation going on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at CNFpod. Tagging those will let me be able to see it and then jump into the fire with you.
01:12:03
Speaker
We are in the fire, baby. Also, you know, consider leaving review of the show and I might just read it on the air. We're all in this mess together, so I just hope you consider that. I'm thinking that's it? I think that's gotta be it. So, until next week, remember, if you can do interview, see ya!
01:12:47
Speaker
you