How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?

Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So the power of your empathic imagination is astounding. Your range, because you're imagining people who've gone through great tragedies, whether it's the Holocaust or Chornobyl or Arctic explorers. What do you think accounts for this diversity of your imagination?

JIM SHEPARD

In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination.

I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Speaking of historical periods that you've written about, you've recently had the adaptation of one of your stories from your collection The World to Come adapted for the screen, seeing your story take on a physical form that it didn't necessarily have, except in the mind's eye of readers and you as the writer. What was that like to see that adaptation?

SHEPARD

It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, "Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!" And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that.

Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

New technologies put fuel on things that might already be going on in society. It goes back to how we began this conversation with your book Project X. People blame incel culture, these disembodied communities for the growing rage among male adolescents, contributing to the violence that lead to the school shooting that you wrote about in Project X.

SHEPARD

What the arts offer is what kids need. Which is some kind of human companionship. Some sense that you're not alone out there. And certainly reading is on the decline, and that's a huge problem. I'm not willing to concede that we all should give up reading and critical thinking, but our culture is pushing us in that direction. I have three children five years apart. And the youngest is 21 years old and her connection to the phone is way more profound than the oldest one. We all are dependent on our phones now. But that sense we have that we need to be checking it all the time, that sense we have that we will not immerse ourselves in the arts anymore because there might be something on our phone we have to check, that's way more widespread now than it used to be.

Once the Columbine shooting happened, I remember thinking that discussion that we had would have been very different if that kid had had access to automatic weapons because the argument that we used to talk him out of it was you're not going to kill enough people to make it worth it. And that kind of alienation I never forgot. Because I also remembered the way adolescence is so apocalyptic. That's something that seems unendurable on Wednesday. On Thursday you sort of go, Okay, I think I can get through that. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I do believe in art for art's sake, but there is this instructive quality that books allow us to live out other lives, and imagine other futures, positive or negative. You've described yourself as a catastrophist. You've written about Chernobyl. What do you feel is the importance of the environmental humanities in terms of expanding our empathy for the planet and for all lives on Earth?

SHEPARD

That sense that we are this unit that moves through a background, and that's the environment, is really destructive. And anything that makes us understand that when we say environment, we mean us. So to me, saying environmentalist, you're like, yeah, me, essentially, I am part of this matrix, as opposed to like a theater backdrop. That's what the world is, my theater backdrop. Anything that demonstrates to us that we're not separate, that if we screw up part of the planet, we're diminishing ourselves in very real and concrete ways is very useful. And it feels as though most readers take that in, in nonfictional terms, but people do it in fictional terms as well all the time in literary terms.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Claire Tolliver with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Claire Tolliver. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).