Interview with Shannon Sanders
I can tell you exactly where I was when I learned Shannon Sanders sold her short story collection (in a parking lot) because after letting out a scream and punching my fist in the air, I looked around to see if my cheering disturbed anyone. But I was so happy, I didn’t really care. Happy for Shannon, and also happy for me and everyone who’d get the chance to read her work.
I met Shannon in 2020 in StoryStudio Chicago’s StoryBoard— we were in the same workshop, led by Danielle Evans. I’d submitted a novel excerpt I was trying to pull off as a story, and Shannon could tell— she noted how it read that way, not like a short story at all. I admired not only her writing and sharp insight on everyone’s work, but how deeply she clearly loves and understands the short story as a form. That year she was awarded the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and the following year, sold her debut collection, Company (out this Tuesday, 10/3!).
The stories in Company follow the Collins family, as well as a few of their acquaintances, in situations when they’re either hosting guests, or visiting someone’s home. There’s a nice range to the stories, but they’re all so sharp, filled with both honesty and warmth. You can read more of my gushing next week when our interview for BOMB drops, but suffice to say, this is a stellar collection.
I’m so happy Shannon agreed to this interview!
Did you ever doubt this book would be published?
Absolutely!! When people first started asking me whether I was assembling a book—and this was early on, as I was workshopping my first couple of stories—I thought the idea seemed absurd. I was writing for the fun of it; it was hard to imagine there was anything publishable in my early drafts. It took me a while to feel confident enough to send things out into the world at all.
Then, even if you set aside the years I spent writing and submitting stories unagented, there was a huge challenge right at the outset. A big part of this book's story is that I started putting it together in early 2020, just before the world turned upside down. I intended to send a completed manuscript to my agent in June 2020 (I cringe looking back on the emails I sent promising her as much)—but between working full-time, caring for a toddler without childcare, welcoming twin babies, and trying to keep everybody safe and healthy, I simply couldn't get it across the finish line until a year later. There were months when I was barely surviving my day-to-day, and I felt really sad that this longtime dream of mine seemed like it was slipping out of my hands.
But after I was through that period, I got very lucky: The process went very quickly once we actually took the book out on submission. It went to auction and landed at Graywolf within a few weeks. I am so glad it happened that way after all the trials of late 2020/early 2021!
Can you share any tips or tricks for staying motivated?
Be creatively non-monogamous! Have lots of irons in the fire, and try to keep an open mind about where the journey might take you. It's really tempting to get hung up on one particular journal, one particular agent, one particular publisher, or even one particular project. But the writing/publishing life is so much easier if you come into it with some flexibility. If one avenue isn't working out, dust your shoulders off and try another. (This is also really helpful when you hit the inevitable long waiting periods. Sitting at your desk waiting for a crucial email can be really painful! Start working on something new instead.)
Any reading recommendations?
I adore short story collections. There are so many I've recently loved that have rightly gotten lots of positive attention—Danielle Evans's The Office of Historical Corrections, Tessa Hadley's After the Funeral, and Nana Nkweti's Walking on Cowrie Shells spring immediately to mind. I also loved Magogodi oaMphela Makhene's Innards and Ada Zhang's The Sorrows of Others; I met both Magogodi and Ada when I participated in the inaugural cohort of Get the Word Out, an awesome publicity generator program for debut authors run by Poets & Writers. (The rest of my cohort has also written some fantastic books, but they're either novels or collections yet to be released!) And Lisa Taddeo's Ghost Lover is a book I love beyond all reason; so much smart, slick humor in that one.
I do also love novels! Dawnie Walton's The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is a fantastic treat for lovers of music and pop culture journalism.
Can you recommend a song (or songs) that ties into your collection in some way?
The central characters in the book are the children and grandchildren of jazz club owners; there are references to various jazz standards throughout all the stories. Some of them are mentioned by name—"Blue Skies," "Pennies from Heaven," "So What," "I Cover the Waterfront," and so on. There are countless great versions of all those staples.
But I'll mention a song here that has less obvious tie-ins. Before I wrote any of these stories, I wrote (and published) a short piece of flash that involves Aubrey Lamb, a recurring character in the book. That piece is set at a bar on 70s night; the song playing in the story (and that was playing when I wrote it) is MFSB's "T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)." The flash piece didn't become a part of the book, but I did wind up reusing several of its elements in "Company," the much longer and more developed title story of the book. Also, the song uses a classic four-on-the-floor drumline, so I'd like to think it's the song playing in the final scene of "The Good, Good Men." I love "T.S.O.P." because it's so evocative of a place and time—which happens to be the era when the four Collins sisters would have been young women. (I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I've always felt like I was meant to come of age then!)
Thank you, Shannon!