For the Guardian, Joshua Ferris pays tribute to his hero, Jim Shepard, who served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine when he was an MFA student. “A lot of critics dislike the professionalisation of creative writing,” Ferris writes, but “they have never had Shepard in a workshop”:

[Shepard’s] insight is humbling, deeply grained, outrageously perceptive and full of a signature humour. (I once saw him tell of an encounter between a beagle and a squirrel, doing impressions of both. His emotional wisdom extends to animals and plants and inanimate objects. He’s the best standup comedian you’ve never seen perform.)