Jim Shepard, "Our Day of Grace"
It’s December 21. Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron, cannot find a stamp.
How would you describe your story?
JIM SHEPARD: It’s an epistolary story set at the very end of the American Civil War, involving an exchange of letters between a young Southern woman and her beau, as well as another southern woman writing to a husband who never responds.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
JS: I began it maybe three years ago. I was doing what I often do—reading bizarrely arcane nonfiction, in this case, collections of Civil War letters—when I was struck by an aspect of them that seemed shockingly relevant to the unhappy position in which our country finds itself today. Even in the very last days of the war, after all of that suffering and all of those losses, letter after letter articulated its conviction that come what may, the South and North would never reconcile their positions when it came to race, and that the abyss that had opened up in American civic life was never going to close. One Southern woman’s bitter remark gave me such a jolt that it kick-started my entire story. She wrote, “The breach between us is so wide that by the war’s end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all.” At that point, I started researching more systematically, and from there the process of writing resembled a lot of my other projects, since I’m often writing fictions that are very research-heavy.
What kind of research went into this story?
JS: Months of months of reading not only collections of letters but also histories about the quotidian aspects of life in the Southern armies during the Civil War. It helps to be the sort of nerd who’s not horrified by such a prospect.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
JS: I love short stories for the way they hit the ground running and leave so much implied or unspoken. I love that experience of ending a story and feeling like a whole world has opened up to me in a miraculously short space of time.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
JS: The usual places: the internet, independent bookstores. I don’t have a website, but an ex-student made one that she does her best to update: https://jimshepard.wordpress.com.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
JS: Boy, what a great question. Anything that makes me feel more fully seen.
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