Save the Short Story

Any day that a writer wins $20,000 for writing short stories is a good day. Jim Shepard won for his short story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway. Not only did he take home the prize money, he also got a silver bowl with his name on it. And we all know that silver is the best type of bowl.

Each of the authors read from their books and talked a bit afterwards with Larry Dark, the prize director. During the Tessa Hadley interview, she was asked what it was that turned a loving couple in one of her stories into two people who didn’t care anymore. Her answer was, “Children have something to do with it.” You could hear about a hundred people sucking in their breaths.

And when asked about the short story in particular, she said that for a person who is starting to write, it’s difficult to work on a long piece, like a novel, because of “finding out halfway through its died.” And she writes short stories because, “I love them.”

Vincent Lam, who is also a medical doctor, shared how he managed to write and pursue his medical license at the same time. Basically, he said he didn’t have kids yet at the time. (Why does everyone blame the kids?) But also, that emergency medicine is shift work, so he would work on stories when he was off his shift — and his wife was in her residency at the time, so she wasn’t able to spend time with him. When pressed further, he said, “It was important to me, ultimately.”

Jim Shepard discussed how he came up with his story, “The Zero Meter Driving Team,” by taking big piles of oral histories about Chernobyl from the library just because he was interested in it. “It shouldn’t be called Research, ” he said. “It should be called Jim Should Get a Life.”

During his interview with Larry Dark, Jim Shepard was very jokey, so it was a surprise when he got very emotional as he accepted the prize. He turned to his fellow nominees and praised them to the audience. “They compel our interest in lives other than our own.”

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