“The whole project of literature—of the arts themselves—is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination.” -Jim Shepard

Winter 2007 issue of Ascent.

The Spring 2008 issue of Ascent includes a reprinted speech by Jim Shepard (author most recently of Like You’d Understand, Anyway) given at Concordia College, where the magazine is published. Shepard’s speech “On Historical Fiction” is about just that, the use of actual elements of human history in fiction—such as, in Shepard’s case, the life of an executioner during the French Revolution or Nazi scientists searching for Yeti. Though such writing runs contrary to the “write what you know” maxim often bandied about, authors writing about events they were not involved in—were perhaps not even alive during—dates back at least as far as Homer’s Iliad and is the basis of Shakespeare’s early history plays. What is most interesting in Shepard’s discussion of historical fiction is that such fiction is grounded in the same imaginative faculty nearly all works of art emerge from: empathy.