You should check out this “BooksbyHeart” tumblr by Joe Fassler, in which “Writers share their dearest literary quotations: lines they’ve committed to memory, taped up by their desks, tattooed on their biceps, triple-starred and underlined.”
Here is a scanned page from Jim Shepard’s teaching copy of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” According to Joe, “Wow. It’s visually stunning, but if you squint at the notes there’s some great pearls of wisdom about the story.”
Jim Shepard, the J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence, presents “The Percheron in the Tunnel.” Delivered July 16, 2012, as part of the Williams Thinking lecture series
“Most of the literature about which I care passionately has a distinct ethical dimension; most — given its project of showing us how we live, in emotional and ethical terms — is concerned in some way with the issue of how to live.”
Read the rest of the interview here.
Jim is featured in the new issue of One Story magazine. This is truly a wonderful, wonderful literary publication and well worth a subscription.
Read the post about the new issue here.
Here is an excerpt from the story:
Fair and very cold. This morning, ice in our bedroom for the first time all winter, and in the kitchen, the water froze on the potatoes as soon as they were washed. Landscapes of frost on the window-panes.
With no pride and little hope and only occasional and uncertain intervals of happiness, we begin the new year. Let me at least learn to be uncomplaining and unselfish. Let me feel gratitude for what I have: some strength, some sense of purpose, some capacity for progress. Some esteem, some respect, and some affection. Yet I cannot say I am improved in any manner, unless it be preferable to be wider in sensation and experience.
My husband has since our acquisition of this farm kept a diary to help him see the year whole, and plan and space his work. In his memorandum book he numbers each field and charges to each the manure, labor, seed &c and then credits each with each crop. This way he knows what each crop and field pays from year to year. He asked me as of last spring once we lost our Nellie to keep in addition a list in a notebook of matters that might otherwise go overlooked, from tools leant out to bills outstanding. But there is no record in these dull and simple pages of the most passionate circumstances of our seasons past, no record of our emotions or fears, our greatest joys or most piercing sorrows.
Jim Shepard at Malaprop’s bookstore and cafe on Sunday, May 1, 2011.
Jim Shepard reading at Broadway books in Portland, Oregon, in May. I was there!
WNYC’s Leonard Lopate interviews Jim Shepard. Click here for the recording.
From Leonard Lopate’s website: “Jim Shepard tells us about his wildly diverse collection of observant stories, You Think That’s Bad: Stories. His writing shows the vastness of human experience—from the fringes and lonely pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average—with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers.”
Denver Book Club is going to discuss Jim’s amazing story, “Sans Farine,” in the community room of Whole Foods at Tamarac. Click here for details.
Christina Palassio of the Toronto Standard brings “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” to the beach and contemplates ‘Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay,’ writing “Shepard’s description is so vivid that within a few sentences you feel the claustrophobia of the darkening sky, hear the thunder of the wave as it builds, see the water as it crests over the hill, cheek-to-cheek with the rumbling clouds. It’s terrifying and majestic.” Read the full article and learn more about Sugar beach here
And the blog “Booked Up” loved “You Think That’s Bad.” (They also deserve the photo credit for the picture above)
Dear Jim Shepard fans,
Sorry this blog has not been updated in a while, but thank you all for your visits and messages! As many of you know, Dave Davies of Fresh Air interviewed Jim Shepard back in June and it was a wonderful interview. Here is an excerpt of the interview, which you can listen to here.
DAVE DAVIES, host:
Well, Jim Shepard, welcome to FRESH AIR. You know, the most common advice we hear given to aspiring writers is write what you know, draw on your own experience for detail and insight. This collection of yours has a huge range.
It’s the story about a black ops specialist from the military, a British woman exploring the Middle East in the 1930s, a Japanese filmmaker in the ’50s, a French nobleman. Why do you embrace such diverse subjects?
Mr. JIM SHEPARD (Author): I think we’re not only hoping to write what we know as literary fiction writers. I think we’re also hoping to write what we can imagine, as well. I think literature is, in some ways, about the exercise of the empathetic imagination, and I’m always interested in stretching that capacity.
I’m also always interested in engaging the world and trying to enlarge my own sense of experience, and so I’m not only looking to reflect my own inner turmoil, which I’m certainly doing, but I’m also looking to teach myself about the world and teach the reader as I do it.
DAVIES: So when you’re writing in the voice of a British woman in the 1930s or a Japanese filmmaker, how do you know you’re getting it right?
Mr. SHEPARD: Boy, that’s a good question. A lot of the time, you fret that you’re not. But what’ll happen is I will immerse myself in a lot of primary documents, until I feel as though I’m starting to get the rhythms and the cadences of that kind of voice down.
Having satisfied myself at some laborious point in the future that I’m doing as well as I think I can do it, I will then often run it by people who know the world better than I do and say: Does any of this sound howlingly(ph) bad or off? Or something like that, as well.
DAVIES: So let’s look at an example of what you do here. The story “The Netherlands Lives with Water” is a sobering vision of climate change, and it’s set in, like, 2030, where water’s rising everywhere. And you look at a family in the Netherlands.
The husband, I guess, is like a civil engineer, right, who manages sophisticated water containment systems, and then he has a wife and a son. And why don’t you give us a reading here? This is a moment, kind of a climactic moment, where things are getting bad. Maybe just explain -set this up, if you will. Explain, you know, who the names are and what’s exactly happening here.
Mr. SHEPARD: Okay. The man is presiding over, late in the story, the sort of juxtaposition of a massive storm and massive outflows from the Rhine that are flooding Rotterdam exactly as he feared they would. And he has discovered that his wife, Cato, has taken their son to Berlin in order to keep him safe, but also, in a way, to separate from him emotionally. So he’s having a sort of double catastrophe come down on him at once. And this is, again, fairly late in the story.
(Reading) The window’s immense pane shudders and flexes before me from the force of what’s pouring out of the North Sea. Water is beginning to run its fingers under the seal on the sash. Cato will send me wry and brisk and newsy text updates whether she receives answers or not, and Henk will author a few, as well.
Everyone in Berlin will track the developments on the monitors above them while they shop or travel or work, the teaser heading reading something like: The Netherlands under siege. Some of the more sober will think: That could have been us.”
Read the rest of the interview here. And even better: click here for the audio version of Jim’s interview.
