Hey Awesome! An Email Exchange with Author Jim Shepard

I'm betting I've probably said I really enjoy the work of Jim Shepard. Why so much a fan? Let me tell you.

My 1st reason is he's got a better handle on the idea of melding fact with fiction than any contemporary author I've heretofore encountered. That's for true. But whenever you're talking about fiction and history you're entering a potentially scary realm, so says I. Because what's the point of bringing history into a story if you're not going to go to some pains to represent it adequately accurately? Tell it sans history, or go the other way and write alternative history fiction such as Steampunk, or whatever, I don't care. That's beside the point in the case of Jim Shepard because he goes for as much stick-to- the-record as is possible.

He also 2ndly tells wildly imaginative stories, very well evidenced by the collection "Like You'd Understand, Anyway." And the best news of all is he has a new collection being published by Knopf and coming out next January. It's called, "You Think That's Bad" -- which I doubt I will think that's bad.

As someone who writes & someone who likes history in fiction & thus struggles to find the best way to balance the two, I turned to Jim Shepard, who is as I've said kind of THE authority on this subject. I emailed him this specific question, "How do you comfortably blur the line between fact and fiction? That is, when do you give up verisimilitude and go ahead and tell the story, history be damned?" He replied as follows:

I try to stay as close to the historical record as I can. And I also choose situations that usually leave me room to maneuver: what went on inside the superstructure of the Hindenburg right before it blew? Nobody knows. Usually the way I operate, I've noticed, is to stick pretty faithfully to the historical narrative as I come to believe it, after all of my investigations (and it also helps to remember that historians themselves often disagree) but to invent freely when it comes to inner lives. So that, going back to Love and Hydrogen, I want to be absolutely accurate about what my two crew members' responsibilities onboard were, but I'm inventing their love affair.

I like the idea of looking for those pockets of doubt in a historical record, and playing with those to tell the story. I would imagine Shepard's advice above will help anchor anyone who struggles with how to organize these elements when writing. It will help me. I can say that much for certain. Shepard also commented on the notion of chutzpah, as my initial question above sort of illustrates and the rest of my email further emphasized, how does a writer take that next step with something as seemingly massive as a historical event, either as marginal as the coronation of this or that English royal or, as Shepard himself has written of, nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl? Shepard said:

And when it comes to that issue of authority -- that paralyzing "Where do *I* get off writing about such things?" question -- I always think: all creative writing is an act of chutzpah, after all. Where do we get off writing about someone we knew in school? Or our mother? Or even ourselves, from 20 years ago? Literature is an act of empathetic imagination. If we write about the Creature from the Black Lagoon, instead of the guy next door, we're just trying to push the envelope. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination if we're not going to use it?

To which I say, ok, I'll buy it.

Electric Literature is Enjoyable to Read, or So I Say

It'll be near impossible for anyone to convince me that there was a short story last year exceeding "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Jim Shepard. I hate to be so unwavering on something like this, a subjective topic which I customarily allow a fair amount of wiggle room for debate. Not this time, I'm afraid. Your welcome to try but I think it'd be hard to find another short story (from last year) that would impress me as much. I hate to sound so fawning but it's just the brimming-with-honesty truth. "Your Fate" was for me one of those stories that keeps you thinking about it days afterward, trying to connect meaning to its enigmatic passages and just being awed by how nicely cohesive the damn thing feels. I don't want to imply cohesion is necessary for a story to achieve this sort of resonance with me, but there is something weirdly cleansing and crisp about it -- like a really seamlessly put together piece of machinery that's also aesthetically pleasing, no superfluous parts and looking polished. As in, maybe a car like this.

And Shepard's short story was only part of what amounted to an excellent lineup featured in the inaugural issue of Electric Literature, which came out this past summer. I suppose I'm a little late hopping on their bandwagon, but I am not ashamed to be. And nothing against Electric Literature but I debate long and hard about buying and subscribing to literary magazines, good as they may appear. Ultimately, I caved and got the first issue, and I now plan to become a subscriber. They deliver a good product, much the same as the nicely hewn short story a la Shepard, and it's appealing to see authors I know I'll at least find interesting, as was the case with well-knowns like Shepard and Michael Cunningham, coupled with others I was less familiar with but whose writing I found topnotch as well: T Cooper, Diana Wagman and Lydia Millet. And isn't that at least part of what a good literary magazine does anyway -- publishes some authors you may not yet know but who are no less good?

I'll summarize the stories in brief: "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" is about avalanches (to sell it very short), "Three-Legged Dog" by Diana Wagman is about a woman with one breast cause of cancer and the man who claims to love her (but does he???), "The Time Machine" by T. Cooper isn't hardly about a time machine but rather is about a man and his jealousy towards another man because of that man's previous marriage to the-man-who-is-jealous's girlfriend-cum-likely future wife (it's funny, probably the funniest of the bunch), "Olympia" -- apparently part of a novel in progress -- by Michael Cunningham is about family and all that jazz, very gripping and well-conceived and I look forward to it novel form, and lastly but not leastly "Sir Henry" by Lydia Willet, a story which makes professional dog walking about as heart rending as I think is within the boundaries of the human language, although that might be slightly hyperbolic. A really excellent collection of short stories, and I'm not just saying that because I really would talk about how much one or more sucked if I indeed thought they did. But I don't because they aren't.

Take a look at Electric Literature yourself today! And they also have a blog, which I equally enjoy.