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[Shepard continues]... self-presentation can be: the way it can braid together self-indictment and self-exoneration in instances that are simultaneously unconscious and quite calculated, and how fluid a process that really is. That self-deception becomes a central way of being for most people, in varying degrees: some things we can't figure out, some things we have figured out, and some things we don't try to figure out. And all of those sorts of moment-by-moment changes that you track nicely above can be generated without a whole lot of conscious planning by the writer in the first person. That's part of what writers mean, I suppose, when they say things like, "The voice just took over."

LRS: What are some of the novels or short stories in first-person that have influenced you along the way?

Shepard: Good question. I'm sure I'm going to forget a shitload. But off the top of my head: Catcher in the Rye, of course, and A Clockwork Orange and Grendel and Memoirs of Hadrian, among the novels; and in terms of short stories, Barthelme's "The School," Hannah's "Testimony of Pilot," Boyle's "We Are Norsemen," Joyce's "Araby" and Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" immediately come to mind.

LRS: You seek out voices in history and popular culture to explore brutality, guilt, and powerlessness (of the masculine variety). Your stories often showcase voices of historical figures: Aeschylus, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Entwistle of The Who. Fiction writer Kevin McIlvoy refers to this as "trespassing"-that is, the writer imagining characters whose experience is largely different from that of the writer's (in setting, time, milieu). These stories stand apart from others such as "The Mortality of Parents" or "Courtesy for Beginners," which are made up of instances that seem closer to your own experience. In "The Zero Meter Diving Team" the narrator, a Russian engineer, recalls the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant disaster, exploring his guilt in relationship to his younger brothers' demise. What drew you to write about this particular historical event and to trespass with this particular voice?

Shepard: Kevin McIlvoy's term for it seems useful, though I'd also think that trespassing in that case occurs nearly all the time in fiction writing. Even when we're remembering ourselves as children we're trespassing in the sense of going somewhere and inhabiting a place where we don't fully, at least any longer, belong. I'm always attracted to those situations from history or myth that put human beings in memorable, and memorably difficult, situations and predicaments. And then it's a matter of interrogating my own emotional life for what it is about that situation that makes it so evocative for me. In the case of a story like "The Zero Meter Diving Team," then, the historical situation becomes a way of making vivid and concrete and urgent-and in the process, helping me work through-a series of related emotional concerns that do preoccupy me in my own life.

LRS: In relationship to "The Zero Meter Diving Team," how would you describe the emotional concerns of the story (or the narrator)? It seems like you're getting at the kind of guilt particular to that of an oldest brother, the way the narrator blazes a path for his younger brothers to follow-in this case, working at a nuclear facility that is designed, built, and run without care for human safety or dignity. Am I close here?

Shepard: Yeah, you're close, I'd say. I was interested in the way in which the country's mode of evading and trying to diffuse responsibility-as well as its way of just closing its eyes and wishing the whole problem would go away (a dilemma that has some resonance for us today, to say the least)-plays out on the microcosmic level, too, within family dynamics. One resembles and helps illuminate-doesn't stand in for, but helps illuminate, both through its similarities and differences-the other.

LRS: I admire your dedication to the short story form-that is, the way you use the form (with its fast starts, tight dramatic focus, silences, careful image-and-metaphor construction, abrupt or shadowy endings) to deploy your various preoccupations. What keeps you coming back to the short story form? What does it offer you the novel does not?

Shepard: I admire the alacrity of the form, the dispatch with which everything needs to be approached and encountered-and the amount that has to be left unsaid. There's a lot that feels like furniture moving in novels. At least in mine.