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A few weeks ago I reviewed You Think That's Bad, a new short story collection by Jim Shepard. In that review I described his stories as "immersive, visceral mini-movies" and said Shepard's writing was "so good it's borderline gaudy" (though Hallett added that "borderline"). The collection takes the reader across the globe from stories about the making of Godzilla to global warming catastrophes in the Netherlands; from a child murderer in medieval France to a mid-century British travel writer exploring the middle east. Jim Shepard is as much a master of the short story as Chekov, creating worlds and conflicts out of contexts so large but making them palpable for any reader through human empathy and deft execution.

Jim Shepard teaches as Williams college, guest edited an issue of Vice, and tonight is reading at Broadway Books tonight (1714 NE Broadway, 7:00 p.m.). He answered some questions of mine via email. Come by tonight and ask him some of your own!

MERCURY: How's the tour going? What did you eat for breakfast today?

JIM SHEPARD: Ha! The tour is going well: on the one hand, it can be, as always, an exercise in humility (when you fly 500 miles in order to read to 10 people); on the other, it's always cheering to meet actual fans, and readers. As for breakfast today, just coffee. I don't often have breakfast. I'm home, getting ready for the Pacific NW stage of the tour. Made pancakes for my kids, though.

Have you been reading any new stories or are you focusing more on the newest collection?

Do you mean writing new stories? I have been working on a new one. If you mean reading new stories, I've mostly been reading non-fiction lately, besides student fiction, of course. I'm just finishing my semester here at Williams College.

When compiling You Think That's Bad, did you have a thematic structure in mind, or do you let your most recent stories take shape on their own?

Each story takes shape on its own. And then it turns out that there are emotional and thematic similarities, since they were all written by the same person.

Clearly a lot of research goes into your writing. The settings and backgrounds are meticulous, the literary equivalent of the wall of sound. Do you start with a setting and then create a character or a conflict to set there?

The wall of sound! I'm the Phil Spector of short fiction! I start, in the case of those research-heavy stories, with a lot of reading that I'm doing for my own pleasure or out of my own curiosity. Then something snags my interest in a special way — meaning I find some emotional resonance with some of the human situations generated by those exotic settings or people — and my story begins to evolve from there. I actually start researching, at that point, rather than just reading around in a subject.

Follow up: does your research follow your areas of interest, or do you find yourself immersed in a subject and then creating a story out of that?

See above. The central subjects of my stories always come out of my own interests, though I might then have to do research outside of my interests in order to make the story work. An example: in my previous collection I wrote a story narrated by one of the senior turbine engineers at Chernobyl. Chernobyl has always been an interest of mine. But in order to write that story, I then had to research things like the Soviet secondary school system. And even I'm not so nerdy that *that* was an interest of mine.

A story that really struck me was The Netherlands Lives With Water. Could you talk a little bit about where that story came from?

McSweeney's approached me with the proposition that I be a part of a special issue of stories focused on a single city, 25 years in the future. When I asked why I would want to do that, they said because they'd send me to whatever city I chose. I told them I was in, and started researching cities in Tahiti. Being me, though, I ended up in Rotterdam. I was interested in the coming effects of climate change, especially in terms of rising sea levels, and the dilemmas of the South Sea islanders in that regard seemed to me too straightforward: they were just going to be victimized by the decisions made by the industrial Northern Hemisphere. The Dutch, though, fascinated me: they're so proactive and comprehensive and responsible in their attempts to ward off the inevitable, and yet, as far as I can see, it's inevitable. The pathos of that attracted me.

Last one. A quote that struck me as integral to the entire collection came from Your Fate Hurtles Down At You. "We've learned more than any who've come before us what to expect, and it will do us no more good than if we'd learned nothing at all." Where does this theme come from?

Again, see previous answer. It comes from one of my obsessions, as you astutely point out: the way we need to acquire knowledge to protect ourselves, and yet the way, simultaneously, knowledge may end up not protecting us, especially since we so often act as though we don't have it.