Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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When Jim Shepard was a 6-year-old in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he accidentally saw the silent vampire film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors, made in 1922 by the German director F.W. Murnau. “I was left in front of the TV by an inattentive baby-sitter,” he recalls. “The film came on, and I still haven't recovered. It simply demolished me.”

Today, at 41, Shepard is a fiction writer known for his virtuoso shifts of subject and theme; his first four novels ranged from a story of Italian American family life (based on his own childhood) to an account of the 8th Air Force in World War Two. But Murnau's poetic, apocalyptic vampire tale continued to haunt him. Shepard's elegant biographical novel Nosferatu (Knopf) is an homage not just to a film, but to the entire life and work of a great and tormented artist.

Shepard, a graduate of Brown, teaches film studies as well as creative writing at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, so he was well acquainted with Murnau's biography. Yet obstacles cropped up as soon as he delved into the inner man. “Murnau's family resists giving up information on his homosexuality,” says Shepard. “So I had to go to Germany, hire assistants, and scour the film institutes and old archives.” What emerged was an image of a theater man turned film director who took part in the lively gay subculture of interwar Berlin. But as Shepard puts it, Murnau was also “a pathologically private man who thought he was making passionately personal movies, but who was seen as someone who made beautiful but cold ones.”

Shepard's microscopic knowledge of Weimar Germany, matched with his litarary gifts, make this novel an utterly convincing journey into a doomed time and a doomed psyche. Though Murnau's coming out is handled with deft lyricism, this is no mere novel of gay awakening. And though Murnau has to face both casual and calculated homophobia, the real source of his pain lies deeper—in the mystery of what we can and cannot know about ourselves. “Murnau could never figure out why he felt so isolated,” says Shepard. “Ultimately, he demolishes his own world—but I think we all do.”

KATHLEEN ALCALÁ
Discovering a secret dimension of the Chicano experience

When she was in her 20s, Kathleen Alcalá was hit over the head by the power of the written word to convey lived reality. A friend showed her a piece by Joan Didion called “Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a nonfiction account of a murder trial in the California suburbs. “I grew up in San Bernardino,” she says, “and Didion's piece caught exactly the atmosphere of those towns in California—centerless, neither rural nor urban. The friend who showed me the piece said, 'Now I understand the stories you tell about where you came from.' In other words, nothing's believable till you see it in print!”

As Alcalá, 44, evolved into a writer—via Stanford, a stint as a press officer for the Democratic National Committee, and work as a documentarian for KNBC in Los Angeles and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—she never forgot the power of storytelling as testimony. Despite her background and résumé, she didn't turn into a nonfiction chronicler of suburban alienation. Instead, she has written three mythopoetic works of fiction, including her latest work, The Flower in the Skull (Chronicle).

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