Writers from China's diaspora
After studying English at Williams College in Massachusetts, Karen Shepard couldn't imagine anyone paying her to write. 'But I also couldn't imagine my writing or my life without it,' she says.
For her Master of Fine Arts and Fiction Writing, she wrote The Fire Horse, a short-story collection about a Chinese woman born in the wrong year. Although Shepard would later cull, rewrite and publish some Fire Horse stories, she failed to get the collection into print.
Success came with her follow-up, An Empire of Women, published in 2000. It's about an ageing Sino-French American photographer, Celine Arneaux, at a reunion complicated by the attendance of outsiders.
The book was inspired by a controversial 1992 collection of photos by Sally Mann called Immediate Family. 'The way she depicts childhood can be offensive - too sexual and violent,' says Shepard. 'They were quite accurate.'
Shepard, 39, investigated the story behind them. It transpired that Mann lay in wait with a large format camera, ready for something traumatic to happen to her children. If she missed a disaster, she'd get the children to recreate it. 'Like a neighbour's kid comes and bites her son, and then she'd recreate a bite on her son's arm later, which I thought was very creepy,' Shepard says. 'And so I kind of thought, 'What must it be like to be one of her children and to have your mother's attention on you filtered through a camera?''
Shepard's latest book focuses on an outwardly more accessible subject: the rogue male. The Bad Boy's Wife opens two years after the divorce of Hannah, the daughter of a rich Southern family, and Cole, a horse trainer who dumped her for her best friend.