About Jim Shepard
“Reading Jim Shepard,” says Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.” This is true, though there’s nothing (merely) national about it. In an oeuvre that now includes six novels (Flights, Paper Doll, Lights Out in the Reptile House, Kiss of the Wolf, Nosferatu, Project X), three story collections (Batting Against Castro, Love and Hydrogen, and the Story Prize–winning, National Book Award–nominated Like You’d Understand Anyway), and a number of inflammatory cultural essays that walk the line, or rather draw one, between contemporary film and the horror-genre politics of the Bush administration, Shepard’s freakishly erudite, feverishly intrepid imagination roams freely, obeying no spatial or temporal borders. His work is angular and taut; at the same time, there’s a warm-blooded, full-throated tenderness as well, an empathy for the many lost, raging souls to whom he gives operatic voice and light—German Expressionist filmmakers, lovesick zeppelin engineers, Parisian executioners, Greek tragedians, Cuban infielders, Russian cosmonauts, Alpine mountaineers, stoic British bass players, those rampaging, hormone-addled terrorists who play Division Five Texas high school football— under pressures that are often literally if not spectacularly apocalyptic. That such exotic settings and subjects yield stories of such breathless emotional intimacy, that their preoccupations feel at once timeless and familiar, is only to say that in both method and achievement this writer is a mythmaker, and a ferocious one. His prose, in the words of Amy Hempel, “is lean, assured, never canned; it is sometimes cinematic and often astringently funny. He reconstructs the ordinary and offers the surreal as a given, finding highly original ways into the most moving stories.” In short: there’s no one quite like him.
I caught up with Jim recently to talk about his work, or rather to e-mail back and forth in a way that simulated talking about his work.
Q: You’re known for writing fierce, aching, high-velocity stories about peculiar historical and/or pop cultural phenomena. Are you drawn to such stories as a reader and (in this case) editor too? And how much are they paying you by the way?
A: I am drawn to such stories as a reader, though hardly exclusively drawn to such stories, and as an editor, I try to be receptive to the best writing that comes in, and on its own terms. I love the stories in this issue, but I can’t imagine that anyone could read through them all and think, Well, of course he picked these stories. They all sound like him. What I do always respond to, as a reader, is “high velocity” stories in the sense of their rate of revelation: I don’t necessarily need to have all that much happening, but I do need to be continually learning, continually having my understanding of the stories’ worlds and characters expanding. Oh: and a king’s ransom, in terms of your second question.
Q: I’m interested in this phrase “the stories’ worlds.” Can you talk a little about your own way of world—and word—building? About the relation between language and world—or subculture, or event—as you yourself practice it? If this is too abstract we can go back to the issue of money.
A: A good question. Sometimes my stories might start with imagined glimpses of a world—for example, if I’m reading about some place bizarre, as I often am—and sometimes, much more often, they start with words themselves: with voices, or even a particular phrase or way of describing something in the world. If they do start with a glimpse of a world in my mind’s eye, they don’t progress much further before they plug in, in some way, to a particular voice or kind of language that excites me. Then, as the thing progresses, the distinction, if I ever fully noted it, breaks down even more.
Q: At what point in your development as a writer did this predilection for reading—and writing—about “bizarre” places announce itself? Were there certain models you found yourself following? Did stuff like, oh, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, or John Ashcroft (granted, the two are virtually interchangeable) seem somehow underexplored or underrepresented by the American short story? I guess I’m asking whether you have always felt the need to go out of your way to write about the weird shit you write about, or has that weird shit gone out of its way to find you, or what? And is that changing over time?
A: In grad school my thesis adviser, John Hawkes, spent a good deal of time nudging me away from the niche in which I seemed to be most comfortable—wry suburban comedy, featuring wry suburban children—and toward the weird. It was by far the most valuable instinct he has helped me realize: that instinct to ferret out and further distress the unexpected strangeness wherever it surfaced in my work. He meant mostly those bizarre and unexpected psychological states, or insights that might pop up in the middle of an otherwise naturalistic story, but was perfectly happy to have me take it further, too, into narrative realms. He loved, for example, “Ida,” a story that featured a boy who found himself quarterbacking the Minnesota Vikings with his mother as the fullback and his father as the head coach.
And of course there were all sorts of wonderful models out there that I could follow. “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” owes a huge debt to John Gardner’s Grendel, and my story about John Ashcroft I’m sure owes a lot to Donald Barthelme. I do think such areas are underrepresented in the American short story, but it’s not as though I’m writing to rectify that. I’m just following my own weird instincts.
As for how things have progressed over time, I’m afraid my loved ones would have to glumly report that I’m only growing stranger.
Q: Speaking of progress or regress over time, how are you feeling these days, as a writer, as a reader, and as a teacher, about the future of fiction reading in this culture? Are you as gloomy and Spenglerian as the rest of us?
A: As gloomy as anyone else who’s been paying attention. I’m not apocalyptic though. Or rather, I’m not apocalyptic about literature, and/or about publishing. I think reading in general and literacy in general and thinking in general are all on the decline and that that’s a miserable, if not harrowing, sign for our democracy. The readership for literary fiction, I think, is going to keep shrinking—as is the readership for pretty much everything else—but I think that there will always be one. Charlie Baxter once speculated to me that it would end up about the size of the readership poetry currently has.
Q: Nice going, Jim. You’re supposed to be inspiring an entire generation of young Ploughshares readers, not bumming everyone out.
A: Boy, did they choose the wrong guy if that’s what they wanted.
Q: OK, so back to American short fiction. One of your work’s more endearing qualities is its cranky insistence that there is in fact such a thing as social class in this society and that it matters. I’m thinking of a story like “Spending the Night With the Poor.” Is there enough of this in our fiction? Is the life of the writer in this country too professionalized, too middle class?
A: Now there’s something that definitely doesn’t show up enough in American fiction, or American culture, for that matter: class. Almost everything else—including race—turns out to be less taboo. I don’t know if it’s because the life of the writer has itself in this country become too professionalized, as you say. I tend to think not. I ascribe it more to the persistent sense everyone in this country is given that class is a subject that you’re going to be penalized for bringing up. It’s not hard to see why. The upper classes have arranged for themselves a grotesque portion of the pie and would prefer that that not be noticed.
Q: I’m sorry, were you talking? Let me just turn down the jets on this Jacuzzi...
A: How long was this supposed to be, anyway? I’ve already forgotten.
Q: Let’s face it, people stopped reading two pages ago.
A: Don’t flatter yourself.
Q: Can we talk about ME now?
A: Yes.