Monika Woods:

It will be a source of solace to me, forever, that in my last email to David I used the word "love." He'd asked me a question about the novel he was working on, which we'd been talking about for several years. And then I asked him a question too. The thing is, the thing that hurts is, I had thought he and I were participating in an ongoing conversation, a conversation which has now been cut short, it's not even one-sided because it needed him to actually be a conversation, and which I will never get to be a part of again. 

I liked giving David a hard time. Teasing him for his hatred of astrology, telling him his favorite Rebecca Curtis story wasn't the best Rebecca Curtis story, claiming he didn't like Kazuo Ishiguro enough, giving him a run for his money in Scrabble, but ultimately losing to him while claiming it was only because he knew the rules better than I did. We didn't always agree, but we were always analogous. 

I think a lot of people loved David because he had depth. He was someone you wanted to think highly of you, he elicited your funniest stories, got you to admit to your unpopular opinions, he made you laugh, but you would laugh together. His disposition wasn't soft even if it was kind, and his prickliness just made him more fun to talk to. When my son was born, he was more than ready with a gift: My First Kafka. And when his daughter was born, I couldn't wait to give him his own copy too. The tender way he looked at my son when they met for the first time, which was the way he looked at his daughter every time I saw him do it- I'll never forget it.

David and I had a history that is irreplaceable, irreplicable. We became friends and collaborators at a precious time in my life when I was proving to everyone, especially to myself, that I was worth talking to. He represented something to me- the joy and inspiration that conversations like ours needed to begin, the faith and durability they needed to continue. I will always miss him. I will always wonder how he would have answered the last question I asked him. 

Nick Mancusi:

My name is Nick Mancusi, and I am a novelist, which is something that I can say in no small part thanks to David Burr Gerrard. I first met DBG about ten years ago as his fan–someone had reverentially passed me his first novel Short Century in the way that cult classics get passed around, and I found it dark, hilarious, and intellectual, the type of book that I look for everywhere and rarely find. So when I encountered him for the first time at a book launch, I was prepared to quickly compliment his work and then slink away back to the free wine. But to my surprise we ended up talking about books and politics for the rest of the evening, and at a second location nearby, until we were both drunk enough that our critical acumen had thoroughly diminished and our wives ushered us home.

What happened next is an experience that many of David friend’s might find familiar, which is that he took uncommon initiative to make sure that we became close friends–and please keep in mind that my fiction at that time existed only on my hard drive and I had less than nothing to offer him career-wise. He invited me to events, to readings, to double dates with his wife Grace, sent me stories he thought I would like and dumb tweets he thought I would hate, introduced me to his agent, and looped me in to multiple group chats–the man loved a group chat. 

Soon we became not only friends but something even more rare and valuable, which is literary comrades. Writing is a tough business and a tougher life, but David made it easier, and I came to consider him my literary older brother. It was David who insisted, at another beer soaked book event, that we take out our phones that instant and set a date in our calendars upon which we would exchange our finished novel manuscripts. We held to this, and these manuscripts would go on to become my first novel, and his second. When he inscribed my copy of the epiphany machine, he wrote, next you will sign a book to me, and it filled me with pride when I was able to do so a few years later.

As my first and last reader, David was immensely valuable. The writers here today will know what that means–it was a little scary to send your work to David, because you knew that no cliche, no boring image, no cheap plotting would survive his markup. You wanted to send him only your best stuff, because he loved you enough to tell you the truth. In fact I am rereading these remarks now and I realized that I opened with a cliche, “in no small part,”—sorry about that David. But his notes in the margins might include things like “oh come on!”, exclamation point, and he’d be right. He demanded that you respect your art as much as he respected it. And with his confidence as an example, it was impossible not to.

This is the impression that I’d most like to leave you with: just how serious of an artist David was. It’s hard to believe that someone so kind, so ethical, so goofy, so enthralled with bad puns could have had such a steely, unwavering belief in the power of art. Not the power to “change the world” (he would have gagged at such a bromide), but the power to accurately reflect the world and maybe even diagnose it, and in so doing provide some solace to those of us who often feel that life can be a cruel joke.

I considered reading some of David’s fiction today, but I could kind of hear him laughing at me while I was trying to find something in his body of work appropriate for this sad context. I would never insult David by suggesting that his work was the “uplifting” kind that they will sometimes print on coffee cups and chipotle bags. We loved his work because of how unflinching it was–Again, he loved you enough to tell you the truth. So instead I’d like to read David’s words from an interview in BOMB magazine: 

“Every serious writer is, in some way, opposed to lessons. Despite this, I think every serious writer wants, or at least should want, to impart some kind of wisdom. If you really don’t have anything to say, why are you writing? I’ve never been a “beautiful sentences above all” kind of writer. I think there should be some kind of point, however oblique… I see the world as a very funny place, and I can’t tell the truth, as I experience it, without that sensibility. People have very grand ideas about what they’re doing, and those ideas clash with the very absurd reality. No matter how special you are, you’re still just walking dust.

David has returned to dust. In word and in deed, he lived an artists’ life. He was my brother. Thank you. 

Michael Costaris:

He was my teacher in 2020 and we were actually corresponding shortly before his death, he was going to write a letter of recommendation for me. He was such a nice person and generous teacher and came at such a crucial juncture in my writing and personal life. 

I had my first child in the middle of our classes (where I was able to introduce her to David and the class). I was also in the midst of getting (and then immediately losing) a literary agent for a schlocky thriller I had written and David really helped me find my confidence in writing literary fiction.

There were 10 of us in the class and we still communicate daily about writing (in a group chat named after David). It was a turning point in all of our writing lives and I'd love to honor David anyway I could.

Camille Jacobson:

I took a writing workshop of David's at the 92Y in 2019 when I first moved to New York after graduating from college. I knew I wanted to be a writer but didn't know how. I had a job I hated at a tech company I hated, and finding his class was such a saving grace. I was so nervous that first day, the first assignment (I think it was to rewrite Rumpelstiltskin?) I'd barely written fiction. In any case, I didn't have anything to be nervous about because immediately I understood that he was one of the warmest, funniest, kindest, most supportive people I'll ever meet. I will never forget how wonderfully kind and brilliant and encouraging he was to me. He told me to keep going, to apply to MFAs. In an email, he wrote to me: "I'm confident you'll be able to go wherever it is you want to go." At that point he was talking about programs, but I took it to mean something bigger,  about life, about following the thing you want so much and have been afraid to admit. I think about that sentence all the time. It was one of the most touching displays of support in my creative life that I had ever felt. 

In any case, I know David is the reason that I'm a writer now, that I'm even working towards publishing my first book. Even after I finished my MFA, he always, always made a point to check in with me and see how I'm doing and celebrate any achievement, big or small. I only wish that I had been able to tell him just how much he meant to me, how important he was. The fact is, we didn't even talk that much and I only took one of his classes--he had many other much closer relationships with friends and students etc. I'm sure---but his impact was enormous; in the back of my mind he was always there, cheering me on. 

He was such a generous, intelligent, curious person and I miss him deeply. It's such an unimaginable loss.  

Fran Hoepfner:

david wrote to me after i mentioned in my newsletter i was reading the galley for our mutual friend alex tanner's book. we both were teaching at the new school, and we were both doing stuff at 92y (him teaching, me learning) and we both liked film, so we decided to grab coffee in the middle of october after his class and before mine. i was instantly charmed by his ease and wealth of knowledge and how funny david was. our tastes were a little different, but he was fun to go back and forth on film about and i found myself taking a lot of notes in my phone about book recommendations he gave me.

i confessed to him something i hadn't confessed to a lot of people that fall, which was that the novel i'd been working on for the past five years had not sold. i admitted that i thought the material had "missed its moment," so to speak, and now sat dated and irrelevant. he told me he felt the same – both about his current manuscript and a lot of what he'd written, and that the thing about moments is that they do keep happening, whether we want them to or not. i found the advice comforting without a trace of condescension or pity. we agreed the moments would just keep happening, and it was the job of the writer to try to catch one as they came. it was a great two-hour talk. i felt enlivened and excited about writing and art, and very eager to read david's work. he talked with great warmth and humor about parenting and teaching as well. our time made a great impact on me during an otherwise difficult time.

we last emailed about a movie i'd hated that he confessed to not liking either, and there was an amorphous plan to get together again for coffee soon. i wish we'd been able to sit together another time.

Lana Schwartz:

Like many other writers, I was fortunate enough to get to know DBG via Twitter, when he invited me to join a Gossip Girl Twitter DM rewatch group - that quickly (and fittingly) turned into a safe space for publishing and media gossip. David was unrelentingly generous with his time and kindness towards other writers, with little regard for or interest in gatekeeping. He took the work seriously but not anything else, which feels like a valuable lesson. I am grateful for his friendship, his support, and his humor, and we are all much lesser without them.

Bryan Woods:

I hope you have a person in your life who is deeply serious about the thing they love most. Shockingly, frustratingly, deadly serious. I hope they love that thing more than is right and natural, and that they devote their lives to it. I hope that person teaches the thing they love all day, and spends their nights with that thing, and wakes up early to do that thing, unable to do anything else because of how deeply serious they are about the thing they love.

And I hope you have a person in your life who is so serious about that thing that they couldn’t imagine loving anything more, until they discover something they can love even more deeply, and another new thing after that, a final new thing, something they love as deeply as a heart can love, and I hope the person in your life never has to feel the fear of losing that last thing. No one should ever have to feel that fear.

And I hope you’ve seen your person be unserious, too. I hope you’ve seen them do something silly, like fall in love with Disney World, or whisper dirty jokes into your ear from across the aches of the whispering gallery in Grand Central, and I hope they wear jeans and sneakers to the beach, like the person I had in my life, because those memories will be important later; you’ll need them.

And if you are blessed to have a person like that in your life, extraordinarily, I hope you still have them, and that you can send them a text message and ask them how they’re doing, and invite them to join you on the slowest long run any two people have ever run, meandering through curved streets with no shoulder for miles and miles along the water, where the cars scream by so closely you can bang their mirrors with balled fists to warn the drivers that you’re both there, laughing and still alive together and running slower than any two people have ever run.