Inside heads: Jim Shepard lectured this week
Whitney A. Stewart
Issue date: 2/26/09 Section: Arts
Fifteen students squinted at 15 fictive sentences they had written in scrawling scripts on the blackboard of a Kendall Hall classroom while visiting writer Jim Shepard paced, waiting.
When sentence No. 7 received eight votes for best sentence, Shepard expended half a stick of chalk circling and underlining words and phrases to expound on junior Megan Hanney's syntax.
Every word in fiction counts, he stressed to the class. Disabuse yourself of the notion that a sentence is like raisin bread, where you swim through a lot of gooey dough to stumble across one little nugget of goodness.
A professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Shepard has published six novels and three collections of short stories, as well as numerous magazines. His most recent collection of 11 short stories, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway," published in 2007, won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Shepard read from his fiction Monday and lectured students Tuesday.
"He's incredibly careful with his composition so there's a lot to learn line by line with him," said Ron Hansen, professor of English at Santa Clara University in California and a friend of Shepard's since 1982, when both taught at the University of Michigan. Both authors of fiction, Hansen said they have served as each other's first readers for years.
"He's really a master of voice and is able to mimic lots of different kinds of people and the other thing is he's able to find in his incredible reservoir of knowledge really wonderful stories that give us a new way of looking at the world and of understanding sometimes these arcane subjects," Hansen said.
Shepard's care for composition led him in one instance from a childish fascination for exploding things to voracious reading about the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The result was, "Zero Meter Driving Team," the first story of "Like You'd Understand, Anway."
It's a first-person account of a man, his brothers and their dad who all work at the plant and must try to resolve old conflicts in the face of death. And it's a perfect example of Shepard's finesse in blending accurate historical detail with an emotionally complex story of characters who readers know as themselves or the neighbors down the street.
When sentence No. 7 received eight votes for best sentence, Shepard expended half a stick of chalk circling and underlining words and phrases to expound on junior Megan Hanney's syntax.
Every word in fiction counts, he stressed to the class. Disabuse yourself of the notion that a sentence is like raisin bread, where you swim through a lot of gooey dough to stumble across one little nugget of goodness.
A professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Shepard has published six novels and three collections of short stories, as well as numerous magazines. His most recent collection of 11 short stories, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway," published in 2007, won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Shepard read from his fiction Monday and lectured students Tuesday.
"He's incredibly careful with his composition so there's a lot to learn line by line with him," said Ron Hansen, professor of English at Santa Clara University in California and a friend of Shepard's since 1982, when both taught at the University of Michigan. Both authors of fiction, Hansen said they have served as each other's first readers for years.
"He's really a master of voice and is able to mimic lots of different kinds of people and the other thing is he's able to find in his incredible reservoir of knowledge really wonderful stories that give us a new way of looking at the world and of understanding sometimes these arcane subjects," Hansen said.
Shepard's care for composition led him in one instance from a childish fascination for exploding things to voracious reading about the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The result was, "Zero Meter Driving Team," the first story of "Like You'd Understand, Anway."
It's a first-person account of a man, his brothers and their dad who all work at the plant and must try to resolve old conflicts in the face of death. And it's a perfect example of Shepard's finesse in blending accurate historical detail with an emotionally complex story of characters who readers know as themselves or the neighbors down the street.
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