2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
136
“BACKSTORY DRIV[ING] PRESENT ACTION” a review by Kristina L. Knotts Philip Gerard. Things We Do When No One Is Watching. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2017.
KRISTINA L. KNOTTS has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee. She works at Westfield State University in the Learning Disabilities Program and also teaches American literature part time. She is a regular reviewer for NCLR. See, too, her essay “‘back to beginnings’: Appalachian Women in Kathryn Stripling Byer’s Wildwood Flower and Isabel Zuber’s Salt,” in NCLR 2007. PHILIP GERARD is a Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and is the author of four novels and seven books of nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to NCLR, and several of his books have been reviewed, including, in NCLR Online 2014, his collection of essays The Patron Saint of Dreams and Other Essays (Hub City Press, 2012) and Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
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Things We Do When No One is Watching is Philip Gerard’s first collection of short stories, though he is no stranger to fiction. He is the author of Hatteras Light and The Dark of the Island. He has also written extensively about creative nonfiction. In his essay “The Fact Behind the Facts,” Gerard describes being a young reporter and reporting on a story with a seemingly heroic ending only to later discover that nefarious events led to the dramatic outcome. This experience taught him to explore the events leading to the conclusion that “[b]ackstory drives present action.”1 This idea certainly serves as an impetus to the stories in Things We Do When No One is Watching, in which the protagonists are driven by their own backstory, trying to uncover how that translates into their current lives. The collection begins with “Night Camp,” a story about shifting one’s usual way of thinking, signaling to the reader to expect the unexpected. The narrator recalls a camp he worked at as
a young man that conducted its activities solely at night. The campers, who all seem to share some sort of disability, whether physical or psychological, slept during the day, and participated in the usual camp activities at night, even active ones like softball or ones the campers invent like “Junebug.” (In this setting, as it happens, there is no barrier for the children’s imagination.) The narrator accepts the unusual terms of this camp, sensing that each camper hides some sort of mystery. “Night Camp” explores the otherness those with disabilities may feel in the outside world, but tells a story about the comfort the children discover at Night Camp. The story’s gentle tone comes through as the narrator tells of the silence of the night games the children played as well as the “beautifully contained” setting of the camp and the “wild and rugged” woods where they stayed (9). The sense of wonder grows in the narrator as the weeks pass, and toward the end of the summer
Philip Gerard, “The Facts Behind the Facts or How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong,” Brevity Craft, n.d.: web.
ABOVE Illustration by Joan Mansfield published with Gerard’s “Flexible Flyer” in NCLR 2005 (Mansfield’s work has been featured often in NCLR, including the cover art for the twentieth issue in 2011.)