A prolific, award-winning novelist and short story writer, Jim Shepard is a master at taking historical, well-researched topics and layering them into riveting, impactful, personal drama. I first became aware of Jim Shepard’s work in 2011, reading his O. Henry winning story, “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a harrowing tale of three men involved in the tenuous work of recording and studying avalanches in 1939. It’s a story that will always stay with me, that opened my eyes to greater possibilities of what fiction could do.

I was thrilled to hear Jim would be giving a master lecture at the Foundry last year. He was kind enough to allow this fanboy further insight into the depth of his experiences and thoughts on writing.

Frank Jackson: During your master lecture at the Foundry, you said that what clicked when you were beginning as a writer was identifying the weirdness in your own work and embracing it. Why can that be such a challenge for early writers?

Jim Shepard: I think that though we all secretly (or not-so-secretly) imagine ourselves as unique, we’re also firmly convinced of our own normality, and therefore tend to overlook just how weird some of our ways of apprehending and moving through the world can be. We also tend to overlook the way that those weirdnesses probably lie at the heart of any hope we might have for originality in our work. Empathizing with others, of course, entails starting to see the world the way they do, and that often helpfully involves some reorientation about our own weirdnesses.

What writers were influences on you in your formative years that you would recommend early writers study?

I recommend young writers read everything that engages them. But when I was groping my way towards being unembarrassing, three writers that I found hugely helpful—partially because they not only did something that I valued amazingly well, but also because how they did it seemed like something that I could break down and figure out—were Ernest Hemingway, for his commitment to rendering the natural world with as much economy as possible, and always with an eye towards its evocativeness in emotional terms about the perceiver; Flannery O’Connor, for her sense of how fundamentally conflicts needed to be embodied in events; and James Baldwin, for his demonstration of how intensities of moral passion could be rendered with precision and elegance.

John Hawkes was a brilliant writer that you studied with at Brown University. What was he like as a teacher? Which of his novels or short stories are favorites of yours?

He was a wonderful teacher for me, though he frustrated a number of my peers. It helped that we matched up well in terms of my shortcomings and his obsessions, and it also helped that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to be as intimidated by him as I should have been. In terms of those shortcomings and my good fortune at having found him as a teacher, I was at that point set on a kind of hopefully- winsome naturalism that I thought was my only option, given my limited gifts, and he was dead set on demonstrating to me that the only interesting aspects of myself that were emerging in those works were the weirdnesses. (See above.) As for my favorite works of his, I loved his novel Travesty, and his short story “Two Shoes for One Foot.”

A few reviewers have described your style for concluding short stories in medias res, in the middle of things. Is that a fair assessment? Is that a form you are consciously drawn to and if so, why?

Charlie Baxter was one of the first readers to note that about my work, and I thought he was right. I suppose there are at least two practical reasons I’m drawn to that strategy: first, I’m often writing about catastrophes from the inside—from those experiencing them—and so there are limitations as to where the narrative can go from that moment of the catastrophe’s onset. And second, I also often write about real catastrophes, so that I seem to the reader to have put myself into a narrative box—i.e., the reader already believes she knows the ending, and so the question becomes: how is he going to end this in a sufficiently revelatory way? An in medias res ending reminds the reader that the fictional work is also completely in control of time.

What is your favorite story to teach because you personally love it, and what is your favorite story to teach because you feel it’s brilliant from a craft perspective?

My favorite story to teach because I personally love it might be Joyce’s “The Dead.” My favorite to teach because of the reliability of its usefulness in craft terms has probably been over the years Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.”

When you’re writing about an historical event, or a topic that demands some intense research, at what point do you tend to find yourself actually knowing the characters and the dramatic elements of what you’re writing about on a deeper level? Is that something you’re aware of from the beginning, or do you find it through the process of writing it out, as you’re developing the story?

My understanding, during such projects, begins on a pretty shallow level—usually with just a persistent curiosity along the lines of Oh my God, what must that have been like, in emotional terms?—and deepens as it goes, layer by layer, revision by revision. Mostly what’s happening is that I’m teaching myself how my own obsessions are beginning to chime with those revelations I’m beginning to uncover about those human beings at the heart of the situations I’m exploring.

Is there something now that is piquing your interest, taking you down the rabbit hole of research? Is there something that has fascinated you that you haven’t had the time to write about yet?

Yes, to both questions. Sometimes I go down that rabbit hole and reemerge with no story or novel, but with a compensatory sense of having been allowed to just go where my nose led me. I like to tell myself that it’s not just self-indulgence but that I’ve also made myself a more interesting person.

You wrote a screenplay along with your friend Ron Hansen based on the story from your collection, “The World to Come,” which was extremely well-received. I know you’re an avid lover of movies, is writing an original screenplay or producing another film something you would like to do? Are there parallels between how you approach a screenplay compared to how you approach a novel?

I like co-writing screenplays, since filmmaking is such a collaborative art anyway, and if you’re working on spec, as someone like myself almost always is, you might as well be having some fun of the sort you wouldn’t be having with your other writing. I try to be wary of screenplays as potentially gobbling time away from fiction writing, though, since writers are such geniuses at procrastination, and that promise of “We’re really only one revision away from making this movie” is the easiest promise for everyone in the film business to make.

Your wife Karen is a prolific writer as well, and you’ve mentioned in the past the editorial relationship the two of you share. I think couples that write together is always a fascinating dynamic. Is there a story of yours that she’s mentioned is a favorite, or does she give you the “I love them all equally” line? Do the two of you line-edit each other’s work, or is it more broad feedback on characters, plot, etc.?

I don’t think there is a particular favorite work of mine, as far as Karen is concerned, in that it probably changes depending upon what aspects of fiction-writing she’s considering, though she’s certainly not in the I love them all equally camp. We do line-edit each other’s work, and we are each other’s first readers.

During your lecture, you also told a really funny story about having to change the title of your debut novel because your publisher was letting Denis Johnson’s upcoming debut take it (Angels). In 2007, you were up for the National Book Award, and it ended up going to Tree of Smoke. Is it fair to say that throughout your career Denis Johnson was your ultimate nemesis?

Ha! No, that’s not fair to say. A pretty good rule of thumb when it comes to awards is that it’s always easier to lose to someone you think is amazing. And my imagining Denis as my nemesis would be like Liechtenstein claiming the same about Russia.

Have you considered writing a memoir? You’ve said before that most writing tends to be autobiographical. Do you have any desire to talk about your life in a direct way, separate from what you’re able to do in fiction?

I have not considered writing a memoir, though a number of my short stories as well as my first novel are very autobiographical not only in sensibility but also in terms of events. Fiction can get so close to memoir that I don’t see the need to make that transition fully.

You published your debut in 1983. After nearly 40 years as a published writer, how do you feel you’ve changed or developed as a writer? Do you ever look back at your early work and think you might’ve done something different with it now?

I think—Thank God—that I now have at least a somewhat greater sense of how difficult some of the hubristic things I’ve been trying to do really are. And no, I don’t look back at my early work that way, or even much at all, really. It’s a little bit like if someone asked you if you wanted to see video footage of your first date: you might imagine for a brief moment that you did, but if you were to do so, you’d probably nearly instantly regret your decision.