Jim Shepard popped onto my radar in 2004 when I received simultaneous review copies of his short story collection, Love and Hydrogen, and his novel, Project X, while working as a reviewer at a daily newspaper. I hadn’t heard of Shepard, but the books sounded interesting, so I took them home and added them to the stack.

A year later, I went to hear Shepard read in Iowa City when he was on campus as a finalist for the director’s position at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He read from Project X, a novel about a young man drawn into a Columbine-type incident, and it was hilarious, terrifying and heartbreaking. I went home, pulled the book out of the stack and read it. I followed with Love and Hydrogen, and have counted myself a fan ever since.

His new story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, is another gem. Some fan I am; I had to learn about it by reading a small blurb/review in a magazine two months after its publication. Such is the fate of writers with Shepard’s talent. It is admittedly daunting to pick up a book of stories that tell stories about excursions through Tibet and Australia, follow the first female Russian cosmonaut and tell of the conflicted nature of France’s Revolution-era executioner. Feel-good lit this ain’t. But it’s a bravura performance that finds Shepard fully inhabiting each of these protagonists in his prose, and easily one of the best books of the year.

I was disappointed when Shepard didn’t land the position at Iowa, if for no other reason than that I was looking forward to hearing him read more often. But, as he mentions below, not getting the job meant there was one less demand on his time, time that ought to be spent writing more stories like these.

TIRBD: Your career seemed to get a kick-start in 2004 with the simultaneous publication of the story collection Love and Hydrogen and the novel Project X, your first books in at least six years. Was it a conscious move on your part to re-enter publishing after a break, a publisher's marketing ploy or perhaps a combination?

JS: Very little that happens to me represents a conscious move on my part. It was mostly a publisher's marketing ploy -- or a better way to put it might be a publisher's despairing attempt to find something that worked, when it came to trying to sell my work. I'd finished Love and Hydrogen earlier than that, but Knopf had conceived of the idea of publishing it together with a novel, and trying to make the publication more of an event in that way. Their plan worked to some extent, I guess.

Is it at all safe to say that thanks to the presence of publications like McSweeney's and the success of writers like George Saunders that there is a sensibility on the rise that is more accepting of your work than you've enjoyed in the past?

I'm not sure. I know that my work does seem to be considered too weird -- too boyish, too childish, too something -- for some markets, so I'm glad for magazines like Tin House and McSweeney's that offer readers -- and writers -- an alternative that's more out of the mainstream. They also seem less bound up with literary celebrity than some magazines. Or maybe they just conceive of celebrity in a different way, given their demographic.

Your short stories seem almost like challenges to yourself, with you inhabiting the heads of a staggeringly disparate cast of characters. The acknowledgment pages of your collections, meanwhile, look like the citation section from a thick academic book. Do you do research on topics that interest you and then decide to write stories based on that information, or do you conceive of the story and then do research to help with the writing?

I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination. A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out. As for research, I read on subjects that interest me, first. Sometimes that sets off something that begins to feel like a story -- almost always because of some mysterious or elusive emotional resonance that I begin to register (as opposed to because I feel like the elements in front of me would make a good story.) Once I've begun to feel that what I've been reading might generate a story, my reading changes, and I begin to do more focused research.

How difficult is it to weave in the parts you have to create from thin air with the details you've learned from your research? Do you ever find yourself having to pull back from injecting unnecessary details simply because you went to the trouble to learn them?

Making stuff up is always the fun part. And it's hard, sometimes, to let go of researched details that are amazing, but part of the revision process involves going over and over the narrative with a ruthlessness towards anything that's thematically redundant or that seems to be retarding the narrative drive.

To that end, have you ever done so much research for a work of fiction that you considered pursuing the story in non-fiction form instead?

Every so often I've considered that. But a non-fiction piece like that, coming from me, would be a kind of an odd thing. I usually don't have enough of a thesis to shape something like that as an essay. Maybe my interest in the material is more visceral, and emotional.

Three of the stories in Like You'd Understand, Anyway – “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” and “Courtesy for Beginners” -- seem different because they're not based around historical figures or events. Did you give any thought to how they would fit with the rest?

No. I was actually happy that they helped vary the collection somewhat. And they're still all about weird people in extremis.

You were a finalist for the director's post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a position eventually given to Lan Samantha Chang instead. What might such a high-profile teaching position have done for your career, good or bad, and how much did that weigh on your decision to pursue it in the first place?

I pursued the position, once I was invited to do so, because I thought if I was ever going to consider leaving my current job, I should at least consider Iowa. It's a chance to be a part of a program that's central to modern American literature. As for the issue of a raised profile, well, that seemed like both a good and a bad thing. And certainly the responsibilities involved in running a program were daunting, to say the least. I feel like I have little enough time to write as it is. And it's one thing to lose writing time to teaching; it's another to lose it to administrating.

Labels: books, Monday Interview