Author and Williams College Senior Lecturer Karen Shepard read from her collection of short stories, Kiss Me Someone (see the New York Times review ) at the final installment of the Writers鈥 Workshop on January 14. During her visit on campus, she visited the Writers’ Workshop English class and gave a public reading.
The author of four novels鈥Don鈥檛 I Know You, The Celestials, The Bad Boy鈥檚 Wife, and An Empire of Women鈥擲hepard often focuses on women鈥檚 experiences, on imperfect women, who behave鈥ell, badly. But they鈥檙e not caricatures; Shepard layers them, rendering them human, said English Department Chair Sarah Sawyer, who oversees the Writers鈥 Workshop series. 鈥淪he is unafraid to confront the complexities of being a woman, and her characters are flawed, intriguing, and real,鈥 she said. 鈥淗er writing reminds me of Simone de Beauvoir’s claim: 鈥業’ve shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.鈥欌
During Shepard鈥檚 presentation, she interspersed readings with questions and answers from the audience, which included students in Matt Liebowitz鈥檚 Writers鈥 Workshop class, as well as interested students, faculty, and staff. “Ms. Shepard engaged their intellectual and creative minds during the workshop,” said Liebowitz. “And in the formal presentation she read a story ‘Popular Girls,’ that seemed to resonate not only because of the encompassing and slightly scary narritive of the story, but in the engrossing way she read it, the shocking, the slyly humorous all blended together.”
Shepard talked about the oft-given advice to writers to 鈥渨rite what you know,鈥 prompting a conversation about identity. She asked rhetorically, 鈥淎s a Chinese-American, half Jewish person, must all my narrators be Chinese-American Jews?”
As if to answer her own question, she said, 鈥淚 am much more interested in writing about what I don鈥檛 know than what I do know,鈥 she said. 鈥淚 write about what I聽want聽to know.鈥