“From: Jim Shepard [mailto:James.R.Shepard@williams.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:41 AM
To: Steve Leveen
Subject: Re: RE:
Dear Steve,
Thanks for such a gracious and generous note. And I agree about the kiss.
Have fun tonight --
All best,
Jim
On Mar 26, 2008, at 8:26 AM, Steve Leveen wrote:
Dear Jim,
That's beautiful. Many thanks. I'll bring a copy of this to our meeting tonight and be a hero, thanks to you.
I'm amazed at the quality of your writing...marveling at how you seem to capture the Soviet spirit in "The Zero Meter Diving Team" and "Eros 7". As for simultaneously being there and not, "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is startling. How could he possibly contemplate that and not even discuss it with his wife!?! And he loves her so much. That sentence, "She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert." Every guy should experience such a kiss at least once in his life.
Anyway, thanks for your art.
All best wishes for continued success,
Steve
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From: Jim Shepard [mailto:James.R.Shepard@williams.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 3:40 PM
To: Steve Leveen
Subject:
Dear Steve,
Harold forwarded me your email, and request. I'd be happy to help out, however I can. I'm not sure I had five specific things in mind when I made that comment, but off the top of my head, some of the emotional and thematic preoccupations that do come up persistently in my fiction are: the ethical costs of passivity; the gradual ways in which we can become complicit in the wrongdoing of charismatic (and even non-charismatic) figures; and the extent to which we can simultaneously be there and not there for those to whom we're supposed to be connected unconditionally. Those are a few ideas important to my work as I understand it, anyway.
I hope that's a help. I wish I could be there for The Mules' discussion --
All best,
Jim
Dear Harold,
My bookgroup, The Mules, will be discussing Jim's book on Wednesday evening. I read with interest his interview on our site but was left with one shoe in the air. Namely, the last sentence of this paragraph...
Oh, boy: intuitively. Though as I was assembling the stories and choosing their order, what you're calling their harmonic effect was evident to me. That seems logical, actually, since the subjects might be bizarrely varied, but the emotional center from which they've all been generated is the same. In other words, while lots of people have talked about how different my narratives and/or my narrative voices might be, the emotional preoccupations tend to be very similar. I probably obsess about the same five things, over and over.
What five things I wonder?
Perhaps you could forward this email to him. I've really been enjoying his stories and it would be grand to take a paragraph from Jim to the meeting...
All best,
Steve
Steve Leveen
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