“There were rules for everything, each one singularly important. Marbles falling ever faster, plunk, plunk, plunk. I started writing them down in my birthday journal, taking every chance to work on my cursive.”
This intertwining of intimate feeling and public display of discipline, both self-imposed and externally enforced, cuts to the heart of Shannon Sanders’ debut story collection, Company, published Oct. 3 by Graywolf Press. A writer, attorney, and mother of three, Sanders has published stories in Electric Literature, One Story, and Puerto Del Sol, which ran her story “The Good, Good Men” that went on to win the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. But it was her time as a workshop participant at Bethesda’s Writer’s Center that pushed her to assemble a collection of linked stories.
Having elected to use the class to workshop complete, stand-alone pieces, Sanders found herself, time and again, returning to old stories for new ideas. Minor characters in one story became the protagonist in the next. “The first story in my collection is about a mother who has a handful of children. I wanted to deeply dive into that mother’s childhood and background, so, in another story, I went to visit her sister, explore the family history, and I kept doing that,” she tells City Paper. “Those connections between them are so satisfying to discover, that miracle of realizing you’ve encountered this character in a totally different context.”
This is how the stories in Company resonate with one another—characters, settings, and even pivotal family lore weave through the entire volume. Specific ideas or dynamics recur across narratives, Sanders confirms, like “the idea of performance and self-presentation. Mother-daughter pairs, multi-generational style interactions, different collisions between baby boomer parent and millennial child.” Having written some of these stories before she was a mother, and many more of them afterward, Sanders sees how the stories evolved with her changing circumstances.
Parenting a toddler during the pandemic lockdown, she couldn’t sequester herself for marathon writing sessions like she had in the past and needed to write mostly at night. These pieces took longer to write, and, for the reader, offer a more circuitous or digressive experience. (“Those are sprinkled throughout,” Sanders teases, for those who want to sort out what she wrote when.) The subjects of her stories changed as well. As a parent, she found herself exploring questions such as, What does it mean to choose or opt out of parenthood? What kinds of shifts happen in a family when children join the family? What kinds of pressures fall on young women?
Having grown up in Silver Spring—she moved away to attend Spelman College in Atlanta before returning to the area for law school and to raise a family—the Maryland native has written a collection in which the D.C. area plays a prominent role. It’s a place, she notes, where some families have lived for generations and supported themselves, often, with federal government jobs. Black families in particular, Sanders notes, can have long and deep roots in this city, and, in her stories, many struggle under the burden of respectability politics, of sharing a holiday table or gene pool with people with very different class identities or educational backgrounds.
But D.C. is equally a city of transients, full of college students and young people who move here for jobs. Sanders details how different corners of the city represent the older, historic contingent, while others skew hipper and younger. “There’s just so many different liminal spaces throughout the broader D.C. community that make for interesting conflict,” she concludes. The collection zooms out to other cities along the east coast, including New York and Atlantic City, and, in the process, conjures the specter of the Great Migration, which continues, even now, to define the contours of Black life.
As a reader, Sanders flags Toni Morrison as a particular inspiration: “[She] is my longest-reaching influence, because when I was a kid starting to read adult literature, she blew my mind wide open with what’s possible.” She credits many contemporary short story writers for showing her what the form can do, including Danielle Evans, Z.Z. Packer, Deesha Philyaw, who is “doing amazing things and getting ready to give us two more books,” Lisa Taddeo, and Alice Munro, as well as Tessa Hadley and Bryan Washington.
Sanders is currently working on her first novel, and her process overlaps with her short story writing. As with her short stories, she explains, “I draft toward the end—it helps me stick the ending;” her novel has required a longer, more detailed outline. But she cannot write a novel in one, sustained burst of inspiration as she once could with her stories. “If I am working around three kids, which is what I’m doing now, it looks a lot different,” she says, “but the outlining is the same.” She prefers to write a polished first draft, after weeks of thinking and planning, rather than what she calls the “word vomit” school of writing: “Revision is really important—we all have to do it. But I really enjoy the momentum of the first draft a lot better than going back and cleaning it up. I try to have the first draft be as close to my intentions as possible.” Anne Lamott, in her essay on “shitty first drafts,” might disagree, but every writer has their own best practices and words of advice.
“No advice is categorically bad!” Sanders assures City Paper, warmly. “You have to find what works for you.” But when pressed, she volunteers two pieces of wisdom, the first being “the stuff that’s fun to write tends to be more fun to read.” The other?
“A piece of advice that was not always great for me? Put things in a drawer forever before sending it out, or work on something for two, three, five years before sending it to a literary magazine. I think if I’d have done that, with kids and a day job, it would have taken me 20 years to get something published. It’s important to take risks and build up an armor for rejection.”
To all writers, but especially women, she implores: “Do be honest, do be critical, but do not let people talk you into counting yourself out.”
Shannon Sanders joins author Kelsey Norris and Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim for a conversation at 7 p.m. on Nov. 16 at MLK Library. dclibrary.libnet. Free.
Sanders also joins the Page Turners Book Club at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 29 at Parklands-Turner Library. dclibrary.libnet. Free.
