Nothing But Anarchy
"Nothing But Anarchy" hosted by Chad Sanders explores and subverts sports, media, Hollywood, and culture. Chad's vulnerable and raw commentary creates a fresh podcast experience you don't want to miss. Tune in Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12PM ET on Youtube Live.
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Instagram: @chadsand
Executive Producer: Chad Sanders
Producer: Morgan Williams
Music: Marcus Williams
Nothing But Anarchy
Eps. #55 Interview with Debut Author, Shannon Sanders on her New Collection of Short Stories "Company": Gender Roles, Publishing Industry, and Navigating Personal Brand
"Company" is available now wherever you get books.
0:08 Chaos and Anarchy With Shannon Sanders
13:39 Gender Roles and Societal Expectations
21:21 Gossip and Hierarchy in Community
30:53 Reading and Social Media Joys
45:10 Discussing Personal Identity and Societal Pressures
50:52 Discussion on Identity and Book Covers
57:19 Authenticity and Kindness in Communication
1:03:17 Exploring Authenticity and Social Media Criticism
1:16:32 An excerpt reading from "Company"
Tune in Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12PM ET to watch the show live on Youtube. Follow @chadsand on Instagram and subscribe to the Nothing But Anarchy Youtube channel for full interviews and more anarchy!
Executive Produced by: Chad Sanders
Produced by: Morgan Williams
This is Nothing but Anarchy. This is the show that explores chaos around the world, around culture, around sports, around media and some other stuff. I think that'll do just nicely for an intro. This is Nothing but Anarchy. This is the show that explores and subverts sports, entertainment, media, publishing, hollywood, all kinds of stuff. This is a very important day. This is a day that I, on some level, have been looking forward to for a really long time years, decades even. Maybe this is also a day that I have been preparing for for decades. I'll explain, but today's a very special episode. It's a bonus episode. It is a conversation with author lawyer, my sister, my IRL sister, shannon Sanders, shannon's. I have a bio for her. First of all, hi, shannon.
Speaker 2:Hi Chad.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. Oh, yay, Thanks for being here, Shannon. Shannon came to Brooklyn for a book signing last night at Books Are Magic in I think that was like Brooklyn Heights is where we were. That was last night. We went out and got dinner. This morning we all woke up in different places and came to the studio so we could have this conversation about sort of about her debut novel company, but, I excuse me, her debut collection of short stories. That's not a novel, right.
Speaker 2:No, a novel is one work of fiction that has a connective thread from start to finish. So yeah, these are interconnected short stories.
Speaker 1:Yes, we got to stop calling everything novels and we're going to get into it. First, let me read her bio. Shannon Sanders is a black writer and is a black writer and attorney and the author of the Linked Short Story Collection Company. That's the book. It's out now everywhere that you get books. Sanders short fiction was the recipient of a 2020 Penn Robert J Dow short story prize for emerging writers and has appeared in several publications, including one story tri quarterly, Joyland Electric Literature and elsewhere.
Speaker 1:She lives in Silver Spring, maryland, with her husband, wesley, who's here with us sitting over there on the couch, and her three sons, my nephews. That's right. That's right, okay. So all that was cute and we're all very excited for you. We're very proud of you. Obviously, this is a day that, on some level, has felt like, has felt inevitable for your whole life. You've been a storyteller since you were as long as you could talk, as far as I can remember right, right, and you're also. It's important for me in this conversation. I think people are going to have many places where they can learn about the book. It's important for me in this conversation that people get to know the author and I, knowing you and knowing how you are and knowing many of your points of view, I talk to you almost every single day. We've been talking almost every single day for 30 years I know that you have strong points of view on the world and on people and on communities and I think the book reflects that. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:I mean, I hope so.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And so in this conversation, I am going to be trying to surface some of the more potent and spicy points of view that you have. Okay, because that's the show, and I have been playing games of strategy against you for many years, so I know all your moves, and so if you try them on me, I'm going to call them out in front of the audience and see if we can still see, if we can still get there. If you're trying to dodge some shit, okay.
Speaker 2:So how wonderful for me.
Speaker 1:I think it is wonderful because I think that is that's the part of your personality that I think I and many connect to and relate to and enjoy is like your very potent points of view, and I don't know, I just want people to get get that from this. So, anyway, let's just enough preamble. So let's just start here, because people do need this context before we just go all the way to the extra spice. What? What is the intention of the book? Like, what did you write the book? To say?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what did I write the book? To say so? It's a collection of 13 linked short stories. It takes like a really multi generational approach because the stories are about the members of this one family grandparents, parents and then their children.
Speaker 2:So I had a lot of things that I wanted to say about just kind of like ideas of cultural legacy and the ways that what our grandparents maybe valued or what they had to do to survive, especially in kind of like the, the Jim Crow era, and maybe like just after the Great Migration so this would be a family that originated in Mississippi, settled in East Coast cities what they had to do to survive and thrive, sort of how like those values either did or didn't work as well or in the same way in subsequent generations. So our boomer parents, the way that they were able to in many ways, like even surpass what their parents accomplished. And then this is the part that maybe I identify with the most there's a lot of characters in the book who are millennials, who inherit some of those same legacies and the. The expressions are really different and then the success rate is really different and in many ways, like we are kind of constrained by things that that did not exist maybe a generation ago although of course, we're free in a lot of ways that did not exist a generation ago either. So I really wanted to kind of take this like multi generational look at some of those legacies.
Speaker 2:I also wanted to do a book that was about like gossip and secrets and lies that maybe circulate in a family, stories that have more than one perspective, and all of the perspectives might be in some way correct. I when you say intention, though, I just I really really love writing, and for at least a solid half of writing the book, I was just writing stories because I was having fun and then I wanted to publish them. And then for the second half, I was doing it because I had an understanding that like a more holistic work was coming together, but the intention was to, like, say things about different things. I had feelings about parental pressure, performance, anxiety, respectability, politics, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:Those are elements of the community that we come from and I can only speak to the community we come from because that's the only one. I know that in some ways, I think have one driven me away from that community in a lot of ways, like I feel, like I've created distance because those, those pressures make me feel bad, they make me feel constrained, they make me feel hurt and I haven't been able to completely find the strength within me to push back against those pressures while within those communities Right, I think I'm. I'm curious about, you know, this book. I've only read the first two stories so far, but I've read so much of your writing over years and even some of your writing appears in this book, so I've actually read more than just those first two stories I can. I think I can see some of what you're saying that's in there.
Speaker 1:For example, people push too hard on their children and they push in. Or maybe you're not saying too hard, but people push hard on their children, they push in sometimes in ways that are in conflicting directions, like they tell you go left and they tell you go right. At the same time, there are gender dynamics in the book that are pretty pronounced, but as I've talked to you about the book, I can only see what I can see, so I want to try to pull out some of the threads that maybe I'm not seeing, like the first time I read it I'm sorry the first short story which I've now read twice, because I read it when you published it years ago and now I've read it again in the book, which is called the Good Good Men it's about. You might tell me it's about something else, but I think this is what it's about. It's about two brothers who I'm going to super paraphrase they go home to bully their mom's new boyfriend, like that's accurate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like that's what they do Every time their mom has a new boyfriend. They go home and bully him and get him out of the paint. And they do it because their dad years ago who has since who left them. When they were children, their dad taught them that like that was something to do is to protect your mom even when she doesn't need protection. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 2:It's a little spoilery, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sorry. Well, I mean yeah, spoiler alert. Yeah, spoiler alert on the whole damn.
Speaker 2:Not a full one, though I think that that's okay to say yeah, that's. I think that's pretty fair. Yeah, it's about two brothers who, you know, feel that they've inherited the charge of protecting their mom from these boyfriends, and so they serially keep bouncing them out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I read that and I told you, I wrote this question down what, like? What does that story and what? What will I learn about men from reading this book?
Speaker 2:So okay, and you told me you were going to ask that question. Yeah, and.
Speaker 1:I meant to ask about women first, but then I did the man thing, I did it.
Speaker 2:So I told myself I was going to like prepare better to answer that question, and then I didn't really do it.
Speaker 1:but good, because I know your moves.
Speaker 2:I do. I do want to say so. That is the first story in the book. This is maybe this is going to be a little bit of a tangent, but I just do it. I'm just going to like explain, kind of what happened there. So that's the story that won the prize that you mentioned in the bio, the Robert J Dow short story prize for emerging writers. It's one of the first stories I wrote and it is the one that I think has gotten the most attention. It got the most attention on its own as like a solo story. I hear sometimes from high school and college teachers who say that they're teaching it. I feel like I have stories that are juicier and better and have like even more depth of character or whatever.
Speaker 2:In the book, but I feel like the maleness and the male centricness of that story makes people really fixate on it for whatever reason, and the description that you just gave, which is probably close to the one that I would give of that story, is critical of those two brothers.
Speaker 2:I hear all the time from people who think it's like a hero tale, a hero's tale, and so I will say I want to say that first of all, which is that I was, it was strongly suggested that I lead the collection with that story because it was the attention getting one and it's like understood to be a strong one.
Speaker 2:There are stories throughout the book that I think give equal amounts of grace and interrogation to characters of all genders and who are. There are a lot of really super flawed women in the book. There are men who play much more benign or benevolent roles in some cases, but I led with that story because I thought that that one set really quickly and easily set up a picture of a character and kind of like the concerns of this family, because another thing that we see of those two brothers is that they are both, in their own ways, like trying to make it, trying to find success. One has embarked on a career in the tech space. He's a, you know, he's a Brooklynite. He's kind of like trying to do a little bit of an on-screen or north thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the sides of his head are shaved and where's all black?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he was devised at a time when I had a brother who had just moved to Brooklyn and was kind of like trying on some new persona stuff. And then the other brother is trying to be more of a success in the conventional way. He has a job in the suburbs, he's married, he lives near home, but he's not really interacting with his mom other than to try to control her romantic life. So back to your question what is this book saying about women and men? I think, and I think that this is probably reflected among you know, through all of the 13 stories. I think what it's saying is that women and men do things that are well-intentioned or that are set up by whatever they think are the values that they have been raised to express, that are often A move has occurred.
Speaker 1:I asked what you were saying about men and you're telling me what it says about women and men. So I just want to call out to the audience a move has occurred and I would like for you to just tell me what is. What are you saying about men? And then we're going to talk about women.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, all right, I'll be a little bit more specific about what I think it's saying about men. Men can do good things. They can do bad things, obviously.
Speaker 2:I think that one thing that distinguishes men from women in the context of a family is that men are given very certain responsibilities explicitly, and sometimes that it depends on what the family is.
Speaker 2:But it can be, provide, be stable, show forms of stability and strength, don't flap in the wind, show consistency or whatever. But usually what they are not called on to do is to be nurturing or emotionally close or keep track of what mom is actually feeling or thinking or what her real needs are. And so if they see something that is a perceived threat or whatever, like a boyfriend who they think is taking advantage, I think that, at least in my experience, it's typical that a family is not going to expect them to be close enough to mom and what she wants and feels in ways that will help them temper. Whatever their response to that is going to be, they're going to stick to protect, protect, evacuate, threat, show strength and stability and force, or whatever it is. Women are usually called on to do the opposite. They're called on to be able to see around a lot of corners and to keep track of a lot of moving pieces of what people's needs are.
Speaker 1:And let's talk about that. In the second story there is a central character who and again I'm going to now I'm going to try to describe it without spoiling the whole story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't tell the end of this one, I won't.
Speaker 1:I won't because I don't know it. You haven't read the end. Yes, so as I see her and it's funny because I, you know, we talk about this a lot but like I'm projecting people from our lives on to all these characters and projecting us myself, our parents, aunties, I have a question real quick. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I know you don't read a ton of fiction other than this, so I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:You know I don't read any.
Speaker 2:You know, I know you don't read any, but do you think you would be doing that if you were reading a short story collection by some other black author?
Speaker 1:I'm actually let's come. I want to talk about, like, the racial element of all this, so I'm but I'm going to answer your question. Do I think I would be doing that?
Speaker 1:Not to the same because it's in the details. Like you know, we have an I know you said this isn't her and it's not but like we have an aunt Susan, there's an aunt Suzette here. One of your sons has the same name as one of the characters in the book. There's a boy in Brooklyn with his head shaved and like his side like. But beyond that, even we, you and I we talk about people with a very like, a very, very high level of detail the people in our lives, and we have been for years.
Speaker 1:So of course I see these little pieces of them that are in here and it's it's impossible to not see them that way. I don't know if I would see that in, and also I think one is, I don't think other people. I don't read a lot of fiction, but or any, but I read a lot of other stuff. I don't know if everybody. I know your voice, you know what I mean. So, like, how I see the people in our world in some ways has been crafted by your voice. A lot of the things I see in the world are projections of things that you told me are how the world works. So now I'm reading a book that you wrote and it's like, of course I see, you told me this color was blue, and now there's a blue person here, so it's like, of course, I see it that way, is that?
Speaker 2:I hear you yeah.
Speaker 1:So where is I going? Oh, second second story there's a. There's a character in this story who is she is managing a lot Like she's managing so many people's points of view. She is managing, she's trying to get people to do things and she's having to leverage all these different voices to get them to do what she wants. She's a career woman, she is a wife, she is a parent, she's an aunt too. You know, that's as far as I'll go on that. But, like, the distinction I see is the two dudes come home and they're like, they're just so laser focused on what they want to get done. And this person has something she wants to get done, but she's she is having to like do a magic trick to make. She's having to do sorcery to make it all happen. Are you saying something about gender in that Like? Can you just now? What was the question about men? Tell me what this is saying about men. What is the book saying about women?
Speaker 2:I mean. Well, again, I'm gonna say I wanted to tell a story and I felt like one story that is that I see cropping up all the time is something like that. So in that story, the character, her name is Cassandra. She has just been named the provost of a university, so that's a huge accomplishment by itself. She is also a wife, she's a mother, she's an aunt, she's, you know, the responsible sister or whatever among her sisters.
Speaker 2:And I just think that that's true to life, that it's never enough for a woman, for example, to be successful in her career.
Speaker 2:People are looking at her to see, well, what's going on at home, you know, what's faltering or whatever it is. If this is such a success for you, I just think that that's that, that's honest. I think that in almost every case when a woman accomplishes something, in any sector, people start immediately trying to see behind her to see what else is going on that's being neglected, and the opposite too, you know, if she I don't think there are as many characters in the book who are primarily family women and don't have like another side to them or whatever but I think that in real life, when that happens, people interrogate like, well, what are you? What are you sacrificing to be able to do only this? And I just don't think that that's true of men in in most cases, I think that if they're doing really well at whatever is their definitional thing and they're doing fine, a couple other things like I think people for the most part like leave them alone.
Speaker 1:So even within that and now I want to sort of take a half step away from the book itself and just talk about, like our community and where we come from. Everything you just described regards how people see each other yeah, like as they're keeping score of each other, basically right, like weighing, judging is this person doing well enough or not well enough? And that is as far as I can feel and see. Sometimes that is the driving undertone of so many interactions across the. I'll describe it as, like the this is ours, but it it's all over the place, this is all over the country, but like our DC, maryland, in Virginia, like sort of well to do black society you know what I mean like black folks with degrees and good jobs, there's a feeling of judgment that this these are my own words, so I'm not putting these on Shannon?
Speaker 4:yeah, these are.
Speaker 1:There's a. There's an undertone at all times of like judgment and scorekeeping and gossip and like who's got the, who's got the. You know the big C-shell what, what's it? That's a conch, it's a conch, what yeah?
Speaker 1:and I see that in this story that we're just talking about and you've talked about it. You talked about it in your conversation last night at books or magic. You talked about one of the he. It was mentioned that one of the themes is like I don't know, gossip and hierarchy or something like that. Like they're about, okay, yeah, just I'm I'm overstate stating it, but like you see something, can you just tell me? Can you just say what it is? Like you see something, you're writing about it. It's there like what is it?
Speaker 2:I think that the way that it comes out in this book probably specifically has to do with I mean well, I already mentioned respectability politics and I think, and I think probably what it reflects here is the anxieties of parents about how their children are going to fare in a world that is set up unfairly, you know, and so there are stories.
Speaker 2:Later in the collection there's one actually it's the very next one you're gonna get to it's called the gatekeepers and it has to do with a mother who is reflecting on choices that she made to try to raise her son to be like one type of black man and ideally not like another type, one that would make people uncomfortable and judgmental, and all of that and sort of all of the sacrifice, all of the work that went into trying to do that, for better or for worse, you know yeah and, in many cases, things that bring other people to judge her as a parent because they look restrictive or they look like they're over, over managed and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:I I mean I think that so you're describing what that community trades back and forth as judgment and I think that that's that's like definitely obviously very much a part of life in any community, and specifically in the one that you're talking about.
Speaker 2:But I also think that you know, for me at least, like I'm damn dear 40 at this point and I have people who look at me now as a product as opposed to as like a product in development. I mean, our mom still looks at me as a as like a product in development, I think, and probably always will. But I have people now who will kind of look at me and say good job, you did whatever the thing is in some way and it might be because you know I got my like I had kids badge, I got my like I published a book badge at this point and and that can feel good, you know, I mean that definitely is something that is rewarding after a lot of well, wait, don't, don't forget to do this, don't forget to do that don't let this drop, don't let that drop. But I think that maybe that's kind of like. The other side of it is that there is a path to being viewed as though you did what they were hoping, you know, or.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, I mean it feels or better or for worse, by the way, but yeah it feels like it creates a cycle where there's such like if the story's called gapekeeping like there's such a pressure and a scrutiny around getting into the right schools, getting the right kind of job, getting married, having kids doing also having some other separate feet outside of those things that you know what I mean and and it's very painful in my even like as someone who hasn't had the same pressure to like have kids and that other thing, like it's very painful.
Speaker 1:And then, like I think it's easy for people to get on the other side of that and, like a fraternity or sorority, take their turn to haze the next crop or to haze somebody who hasn't gotten in yet. And I guess, with you being someone who's aware of that and as someone who I very also much agree that you have sort of crossed the threshold, you know, into acceptance from those types of people in that type of world, or that those types of judgments like what do you do now to not? What's the word? Propagate to not? Like yeah, propel that same structure, perpetuate, thank you, that same structure forward, like how do you not do that?
Speaker 2:I well, there's okay. Again like this is really fuzzy or whatever. Like in every community, but it's true, in every community there are people who are there to there are there. There are people who are there to gatekeep. There are people who are there to hold up whatever the strictures of the community are and who really like and want to do that thing.
Speaker 2:I do not consider myself a person who likes to do that thing, and I think a lot of creative people I consider myself one of them, you're obviously one are not all that interested in.
Speaker 2:I mean, there can be overlap, but I don't think of myself as a joiner in that way.
Speaker 2:I think that there are people who are very much like okay, we all have to do this thing, and then we have to make sure that everybody else has to, you know, does the same thing and we have to make sure that they value the same thing, because then they will look up to us as we have already achieved that thing and I'm just sort of not interested in that because I would rather be writing books and I also.
Speaker 2:My kids are all boys and this is back to your questions about gender. I think that there's so much that I feel like Wes and I are gonna have to do to try to make sure that they have good, healthy, happy lives and that they have a lot of options in front of them. But I also see that sons, by and large, are not really here for a lot of the same. They often do not let themselves be moved around and some of the same ways, I think so yeah, I mean, and in my own experience, like not while being unaffected by it right, yeah, oh, I know, yeah for sure, and we talk about that in nauseam I'm still.
Speaker 1:It still bothers me, yeah, that people that were like, people that we care about, people that are, like you know, relatives, friends, aunties, people we grew up with like it still bothers me that, whether or not I fit in the bracket, like the bracket still exists and they're still holding it up against me, like that still bothers me. But I also do acknowledge that it's like, yeah, like you know, patriarchy provides for more opportunity for me to, like, go create my own bracket, sort of.
Speaker 2:And I think you probably, I think they give you a looser bracket too. Yeah, I think the bracket that they're holding up is a little bit more. The lines are a little fuzzier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you took. So when you talk about not being a joiner now I'm gonna go way back and kind of try to paint the picture of you as a child as I saw you, because it's amazing that you have, like, it's amazing that you have accomplished so many things that have societal value. Because you did not seem to. I mean, you didn't seem to care about, like, the societal hierarchy, like you didn't seem to care about the societal structure with, like the way I would describe it is, you would be happy to be the kid sitting by herself somewhere coloring, drawing a picture, writing down names in a notebook and playing a name game with yourself. You weren't trying to like do the. You weren't trying to do like the high school Game of Thrones game Like you were. I think. You were just trying to do what you liked doing for the most part.
Speaker 2:I mean, I definitely would have liked to. I think I didn't wanna play the high school Game of Thrones because I was destined to lose it.
Speaker 2:So I do think that part of it had to do with I just figured out other stuff to do that was not quite as destined to failure. But yeah, I mean I was not real. I definitely wasn't into like sports or other things that were that engendered like a team feeling. I was usually the only black kid in class for several years in a row and so just a lot of kind of the metrics that people were judged by just really didn't apply to me. When people started to you know date and stuff and when they started to form these little groups that were kind of more about whatever boy-girl interactions, like I just was not at all really in that.
Speaker 2:So I kind of I found like my little fringe friends and stuff and I do think that had I been part of a community where I felt more like I was the median, where I felt closer to the median of the community and not like an outlier, I think I probably would have done a lot more joining stuff and probably a lot less finding what I really liked to do and who I really was early on. I heard somebody say recently that like if there's someone who's gonna be successful at something as an adult, it's usually whatever they spent the most time obsessively doing between age 13 and age 17. And for me that was, you know, writing, like reading and writing pretty much, and like obsessing over these different fan properties, these franchises, the X-Files, star Wars, whatever, yeah. So I don't know if I'm like going a field of the question, but yeah, I was not a joiner. Long story short.
Speaker 1:What did you love about those things? Like you were, I think. Some people say they love to read and I get what they're saying, but I think your thing is a lot more intense than that. It was like our parents used to used to get in trouble for reading too much. That's so unusual. Like most kids get in trouble, for me it was, like you know, they had to incentivize me to read by like with stuff like pizza.
Speaker 2:Well, are you talking about book it, because I also did book it. Yes, you did book it.
Speaker 1:but like there was, there were different structures in place to get me to read, like I had reading my reading limits, where you must read at least this much.
Speaker 2:Your reading limits were like Don't bring books to the table.
Speaker 1:Don't bring books in the car on a family trip. Like, put the book down. What did you love about it? I'm going to guess what you loved about it and I would love for you to respond to it. Did you just, did you just two things? Your mind is going really, really fast all the time. Your mind has a lot of horsepower and I think it gave you somewhere to exercise that horsepower. That's one guess, and the other is I think sometimes you wanted to be somewhere else than where you were. I think most times Tots, yeah, is that fair?
Speaker 2:That's definitely fair. Yeah, I mean, and that's not unusual, people love to read because it transports them, it lets them see something else. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely very much into like they're often in elementary school especially, I often was not excited by what I was actually doing, which would be like PE class I'm just going to throw out girl scouts, even though I did like girl scouts sometimes, but you know like they would be wanting you to do stuff that was just not that. That didn't occupy like all the parts of my mind that I wanted to be using. And so, yeah, I was reading.
Speaker 2:For that reason, I had my mind like blown open by certain books that I read at an early age. The one that I always mentioned is Flowers and the Attic. I was like 11, a little bit too young to read that book, but I read it at summer camp and I just was like the level of suspense that I was feeling as I read the end of that book was beyond like anything I had ever felt was in any extracurricular activity and I just felt like, you know, wow, this is so much more than what I'm doing, which at that point, I was like a dance camp and I was not a dancer but I was in to dance and so she sent me to dance camp a couple of times and I'm thankful for that because I got to say definitively well, I'm not a dancer. But this book that I found in the library Flowers and the Attic, like was amazing. So there's that. That's number one is that it was just transporting.
Speaker 2:And then I know that really early on I was not just reading for the content but also for curiosity about the mechanics of like what the author was doing behind the scenes. Like I started to pay attention, probably around second grade, I would say, to like choices that the author was making to build and give versimilitude to the world that they were building. I was a big, I was into the babysitters club, for example, and there's like at this point there's hundreds of books in the series. But then there were at the time when I was in elementary school there were like 50, and then 60, and then 70. And I just remember like reading the books and not so much following the story anymore as being like okay, what's Anne, the author, anne Martin, what's she gonna do now to get this character to this resolution, you know? So I started to just kind of like develop questions about storytelling as an art pretty early, I would say.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that reminds me there used to be. There used to be babysitters club's books in the bathroom and I would like sit down in the toilet and I would be like, fuck, what am I gonna do in here? There's no cell phones, so I'll like, so I pick up one of those books and I would try to read like one sentence, and I couldn't do it. I would just close it and put it down and just sit there and think, so, shout out to the babysitters club.
Speaker 2:And literally meanwhile I was reading them so voraciously that when I would go to like this elastic book fair I would get in trouble if I brought home more than two of them, or sometimes more than zero. Mom was like no, we're babysitters club.
Speaker 1:Okay, I wanna talk about like the business of this a little bit and social media and how people present themselves and I'm gonna try to get you to say I'm gonna try to get you to cross the spice threshold. So I am taking a particular pleasure in this moment where you are being celebrated and seen and your creative product is out, like your art is in the world. It looks right, like it feels right, it has all the right cosigns and blurbs and it's got a good buzz. And 90 people came out to see you in DC two nights ago and people were. We filled up all the seats at Books Are Magic last night and I see your, like I just see it's just happening, it's all happening.
Speaker 1:People are like wow, like there's a phenomenal writer out there who I need to follow now and part of why it's giving me pleasure is like or joy is I've watched you like not change who you are at all to have this moment right.
Speaker 1:Like, even though you tweet way more than you used to, you always tweet in your voice. Like I never see you, you never look like. I've watched people blow up by being dickheads. Like I've watched people blow up by like changing who they are changing their tone, pandering, like you know and I see you, you're playing the instrument, the internet, like you're doing the thing. But it just feels like you every time and that's meaningful to me, obviously, because, like I know you Before I try to get you to move over to shitting on other people like, let's start with the positive here. Like, let's start with you. Have you found a way to enjoy this part of the game, the part that is branding yourself in some way using social media, being a little bit exposed, being a little vulnerable, in a way that you know you're getting your voice out there, not just through your artistic product but like through the internet? Have you found a way to enjoy it at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I got active on Twitter X in 2020. So I mean, I was being strategic about it. It was right after I won the Dow Prize, I was like, okay, I think this is probably gonna start to move toward trying to publish a book, so let me start to use social media in a little bit more of a pronounced way. Then, of course, the pandemic hit and then I was really, really isolated in a lot of ways and a big lifeline for me became connecting with other moms on Twitter. So it became something that I had gone from like avoiding in a pretty intentional way for many years to something that I really liked to do and something that I kind of relied on in some ways because, you know, things were just really, really difficult. Then I had a little kid Right, and writers do not.
Speaker 2:I feel like writers. For us, x is the place because we don't really, in many cases, want to be looked at. We don't want to show our kitchen because it looks the best. We don't really want to show our face because it's not of interest to us. You know, x is I really don't want to call it X the.
Speaker 1:Don't just call it Twitter. Yeah, it's formerly known as Twitter.
Speaker 2:Twitter is a lot more of a place where you can actually have like brain to brain connection. I think, and I mean I sincerely do like it. It's a community that I think is going to implode, but I wish that it wouldn't. And yeah, I mean as far as the book goes, I'm in a special situation because writing is not my full-time career. I have a day job.
Speaker 2:I'm not concerned about writing, I'm not concerned about if the book fails like am I gonna be able to feed the kids? And so for me, the goal is really to produce something that I'm actually very proud of and that I really stand behind, which, in this case, that happened. You know, I really I love the cover of the book, I'm excited for people to read the stories, and so there is really only positive feeling behind sharing things on social media. I think that if I were in a position where I were trying to crank out, you know, a novel every two years or whatever in a genre that I knew was popular, where people were gonna be reading it, I'm sure that it would start to feel like an opportunity just to shill, and that would be a lot less rewarding for me probably.
Speaker 1:Because the reward for you is you write something, you refine it, refine it, refine it until it's what you like, and then you give it out to people, you share it with the world and the reward is which part of it is the reward actually? Where's like peak reward, Like where does the rat get the cheese?
Speaker 2:For me it has been people reading the stories. I mean, like a lot of the stories. I try to have some element of a puzzle to them. I try to have there be little things that if you're reading carefully you might notice in a way that somebody who's skimming will not. And I've been really excited by people like texting me to say, oh my gosh, is this what just happened? You know, people like people showing me that I have succeeded in some way at creating the thing that I tried to create. So that's the thing.
Speaker 1:So there's a couple of things we need to parse around what you said before answering that last question about the internet and writers and otherwise, right. So one is this and I bet you felt it as you said it, maybe not which is like I am way more engaged on Instagram than I am on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Now, is that to say that, like, let's take it away from me. Like, last night we did your event. You don't even know this, but I took like a couple of videos on the walk-in. I probably made us take 10 times more photos outside than you would have naturally done. So, right, I asked for reshoots, I asked for lighting, I asked for angles. That's not who I was a few years ago, like at all.
Speaker 1:But I do recognize that, in my opinion, for me to have some autonomy over this thing, for me to not be beholden to Simon and Schuster, like I have to learn those skills and I have to figure out how to like market and self-distribute, so that's why I do it and I also have like a performative streak, like I did do the plays I was on the TV show when we were kids, whatever, right, I guess what I'm saying. There's two things I wanna ask you. One is like Do you think there are? How do? All? Right, that's some more complicated questions, so I'm gonna come back to that one. Here's the first thing. It's this While I'm doing that right, cause I'm doing it, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna be overly sanctimonious, I think is the word.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'm partially doing it for myself, but I'm also doing it cause I'm like I don't know, like I'm projecting a want onto you which is like, if Shannon wants to be a famous, career, wealthy author, whether she likes it or not, like Roxanne Gay's photo is everywhere, like Roxanne Gay's face is on everything, you know what I mean. So, whether she likes it or not, she needs, like she's gonna have to do this, she's gonna have to play this game. But I'd never have asked you if that's even something that you want, or even if you subscribe to that belief. Like, do you subscribe to that belief and is that something that you want?
Speaker 2:Do I subscribe to the belief that you have to be like that? You have to get your lighting right if you wanna be a good writer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like Stephen King.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, think about those two examples. Stephen King have you seen pictures of him?
Speaker 1:He's ugly.
Speaker 2:He's not, I'm not gonna call him ugly. I'm gonna call Stephen King ugly, but he's not.
Speaker 1:Well, I think he's ugly, but he's like ugly handsome, he's like gangly. He looks like a monster.
Speaker 2:He has a very distinctive face and he's not he's not like, he's not putting on like a velvet tux to take his pics. The other example, roxanne Gay, who she's beautiful. Obviously there are things about her that are very unconventional in her appearance and she really leans into and like embraces that and she has a very authentic look. I feel about her.
Speaker 2:Like every photo I've ever seen of her, her, the expression on her face is one that is thoughtful instead of solicitous, like she's not trying to like make the audience happy to look at her, or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yes, shannon is saying so diplomatically, like by her own description, she is fat, tall, like she is a really, really big woman and she does not like. She does not like douse herself in makeup and like fake eyelashes and like do the whole. Yeah, but she does like. Her spirit shines through the photos of her.
Speaker 2:She has a ton of presence, and I would say that she, that the presence that she gives, is a good match for the content of her books, which is a sardonic, self-critical, sometimes really thoughtful and honest voice. So, which is to say, obviously, both of those people, stephen King and Roxanne Gay I'm sure they get their makeup and their hair done right before they get photos taken, and that's something that I would certainly like, certainly I assume that that's in my future at some point. I think that it is important to figure out, kind of like, what your brand is for you. I mean, like, tell me if you think that this is not true.
Speaker 2:I feel like you're a creator, like you're a, but you're a multifaceted creator in much more of a like. I don't think of myself as a multifaceted creator. I think of myself as a writer, predominantly Creatively. You know what I mean, and I do think there will come a day where I probably have to reconcile with like oh gosh, I'm gonna have to make, like I'm gonna have to join TikTok, for example, cause there's book talk, and yeah, yeah yeah, I mean I we're trying to solve TikTok right here on Nothing, Bananaki.
Speaker 2:I feel like you're well, you're better set up than I am, because I do not have a Morgan or XO.
Speaker 1:No one has a Morgan, but me and a couple other people.
Speaker 2:No, only Morgan has a Morgan.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know, I know, I know I don't have a.
Speaker 1:Morgan, but we've been trying to find other Morgans and they're very hard to find.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, that's all. But yeah, I mean I'm with it Like thanks for getting the lighting right on our pictures last night.
Speaker 1:So you are a writer and you also are a marketer. You know, I think I'm not trying to like, I'm not trying to preach it, it's really. It's been something I've been trying to digest too. It's like as much as I'm doing all these things, like I am all these things. Someone else might be like a professional market or something like that, but whatever.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean like on that, I guess what I'll say is for me right now, with this book specifically, and then I do hope that I write another book and that it is that it builds on like this foundation or whatever. So I do hope that I have like more of a platform at that point. But for me right now the sweet spot is kind of like I want people to read the book, admire it. I want them, if they do see me or perceive me in any way, I want them to be like oh okay.
Speaker 2:And something that happened for me with this book, which was that I put up pictures of my like scarf I was knitting at the time that matched the cover of the book, and then in the signing lines at both of the bookstores people were like is that the scarf? It looks great, you finished it. And I just want them to look at me and be like pleasant and then be like fine, that's kind of what they think. But I do feel like I'm sure that when I have a little bit more time and energy to give to it, then I got to find my medallions and stuff too.
Speaker 1:So and that's Shannon making a joke because I'm wearing a chain, because they can't see me. Another interesting question I think I'm projecting this on the book, but I really think I see it in there, which is like. I mean, you've said it. You keep talking about the stuff parents put on their kids. What is something, what are some things that you like? If you could snap your fingers and this thing that feels put upon you and it doesn't even just have to be by your parents, just by like your society, your community, like what? Would you just want to snap your fingers and just be relieved of that for the rest of your life? A sort of judgment, a sort of whatever. But I was like, what would it be and why?
Speaker 2:All of my answers feel really basic. That's great. Wait, can you say yours first? Give me a bigger. I mean, I'll say a really basic one like weight food, everything about my relationship with food probably.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think that that's necessarily something that our parents put on me at all, but society as a whole, like I feel like I would have a lot of brain space freed up if I didn't care about weight or food or appearance as tied to those things.
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever heard you talk about that, ever. I don't think we have ever talked about that one single time, so I'm glad you said it.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, there's one.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that, I think for me. I mean, I've definitely seen the adult ramifications of people not having enough money lately, like I literally I'm watching how it can destroy things like can tear people apart, couples apart, families apart. I think that is also very cliche one. But now getting to watch it play out in my mid 30s, like when the stakes are much more real than they were 10 years ago for many of us, for some of us, so are you saying like you're a socialist, or are you saying like you're?
Speaker 2:saying you would take away the pressure surrounding money. That's what you mean If you could snap your fingers and remove it from your own life and other people's.
Speaker 1:That feels like a loaded question because I guess I'm not about to sit here and say I'm a socialist into this microphone.
Speaker 2:Okay, but I'm just trying to define your answer.
Speaker 1:I just wish, frankly, like I think what I'm saying is, I wish black people could have some relief from like poverty. Right, for people who are actually in poverty, but even for people who are middle class, just like the threat of falling into a lower class and how that will, how that can destroy a person's self-esteem, family communities, like I don't know. I guess that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, I mean me too yeah.
Speaker 1:And also let's talk about, since I just brought it up. I stumbled over your bio because it said Shannon Sanders is a black writer. Those are the first one, two, three, four, five words of the bio and I didn't expect to see black there. So I know you probably spent a lot of time crafting your bio. Why did you choose to include the word black there? I'm curious.
Speaker 2:Because it's true and I want people to have a grounding to an expectation, and I want also I mean, of course, I don't want to alienate any part of an audience and I'm sure that there are people who put the book back down if they think it's about black people, as they do for all books that are by black authors, or about black characters.
Speaker 2:But I mean I want people to know that I identify with that. I think that I've mentioned this a couple of times. In these bookstore events and stuff, there's like a small number of working, successful black woman short story writers. I'm really proud of them. I think that they are doing something in many ways that is very special, because they are doing everything that every other short story writer is doing, but then they are lacing in a particular experience, that is, they are they're doing it backward and in heels, like Ginger Rogers or whatever, and they also are doing it in a way that is that has to be accepted, the way that Ernest Hemingway's stories are accepted, but also they have to do it in a way that is true to them. And so I really aspire to be like them and I wanna make sure that that is known, that I'm not trying to like, pretend otherwise or something or hide.
Speaker 1:And this is a nuanced complexity of the whole experience of being a black creative person and you also wanted to tell your publisher do not give me one of those basic black ass covers, because I don't want somebody to think they know what my book is before they open it, and what I mean by that. I'm paraphrasing. You were specific to say do not give me a cover for my book. That pattern matches to every other cover by a black woman Like let's have some specificity and precision about what my cover is. Can you talk a little bit about how you like? I remember you telling me that was a fear of yours that they were gonna slap something on it like that, what? Where does that fear come from and how did you deal with it and how did you end up getting what I think is a much more artistic cover than that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So that has been something that I have always worried about in some way. And, to be clear, so my publisher is Gray Wolf. They were wonderful, they were really responsive and receptive when we talked about that. They give you a questionnaire, they say kind of like, what are some of your hopes for the cover, and that kind of thing, and they understood exactly what I meant when I said like I'm trying to hue away from what I see, which is kind of this.
Speaker 2:So I love Jacob Lawrence as a painter, obviously, but we see like this theme of faceless black, you know figures, literally the color black figures with big natural hair in sort of like block colors on the cover, and there are very successful writers who have had lots of covers like that. And I just did not want to, even though, of course, like I said, I wanted to be, I want to consider myself in the tradition of like Daniel Evans and Zizi Packer and the piece of Thompson Spires and other black writers who I think are very clearly writing about black people. I did not want to pigeonhole the reader experience in that I didn't want them to pick up the cover, see those figures and then be thinking of those figures and whatever they associate with those figures. As they turn to the first story, Gotcha, you know.
Speaker 2:And they were super responsive to that. They, like immediately understood what I meant. I showed them a couple of examples of things that I admired but did not want, and we ended up working with a really wonderful designer. Her name is Kimberly Glider I think she might be based in Brooklyn, actually and she came up with something that was so far outside of anything that I ever would have thought of, but I personally think it's really perfect. I love like the modularity of it and like the four squares, because there's a lot of structure in the stories. There's a lot of like. This is how you have to present.
Speaker 2:This is how you should behave, and I like all the angles that you see on the cover, but then I like also that there is this hint of a secret. There's a shadow in one of the windows on the front of the cover. I think that it's like yeah, she did a perfect job.
Speaker 1:It's a lovely cover. We have 30 minutes left and when we come back we're gonna I'm gonna get really transparent about trying to bait you on being spicy. I'm just gonna literally throw things at you that I know you have spicy takes on. So we're gonna stop talking, we're gonna probably move away for a little bit from the book and from the authorial experience, and now I just want people to. Now we're just gonna be podcasting, but where can people find you? First of all, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:They can find me at ShannonSandersWritescom, and they can also find me on X at username ShandersWrites. S-h-a-n-d-e-r-s. Writes W-R-I-T-E-S.
Speaker 1:And they can find me on X at Coachella. Sorry, just kidding, that was just a punchline. Go ahead, please continue.
Speaker 2:And to a lesser extent they could find me on Instagram at iexaggerate.
Speaker 1:And where do they buy the book?
Speaker 2:Anywhere that books are sold. So preferably your own local independent bookstore, because we'll be able to write books for longer as long as those bookstores still exist. If you need one, that you. If you don't have one and you need one, order it from loyalty bookstores in DC or Silver Spring, maryland, but it can also be found at Barnes, noble, amazon, indie Bound, everywhere.
Speaker 1:That's right. Buy it on Amazon only if you have to, because Amazon owns AMP and AMP is going away because they just destroyed it out of nowhere and fired everybody and they're cannibalizing all the bookstores. That's right, All right. Now, here's where we here's where my understanding of Shannon's moves is gonna be of prime importance.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm not gonna talk shit about anybody.
Speaker 1:I'm not asking you to.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:See, that's a move. That's a move. Shannon has a mask on, also because of COVID safety, and they have three little kids and you know. So I can't see her whole face, which is debilitating to my ability to withstand her ninja moves, but I'm gonna do my best. Okay, you're not gonna talk shit about anybody, you're just. You know what. Matter of fact, let's just start there. You have the spiciest takes of anybody, wesley, do you corroborate this? You would agree. Okay, shannon's husband, wesley, just corroborated that Shannon has extremely spicy takes and I think my takes are like at the 80%ile level of the spice of your takes. Basically, that's what I would say. Why and this is a real question, like with a real answer? But just give me the real answer Like, why do you start off by saying I'm not gonna talk shit about anybody? You know I'm not gonna ask you to specifically talk shit about anybody.
Speaker 1:Maybe you know that, but like I do want you to blow venom into the microphone a little bit because, like I think people need to, they need to get the sentiment in its raw form, sometimes, like it's potent. That way, and you're smart, you have good takes, you have a good heart, like the people who would judge you for your point of view or be mad at you are the ones who need to be affected by it, in my opinion. What do you think?
Speaker 2:I hear that. I hear that, I mean I am interested in. I don't understand. So what's the question Like? What's the difference between?
Speaker 1:No, the question is like. I know that you want to give your point of view. You never want to just like blow, torch people's eyebrows with it Right, yeah. Why.
Speaker 2:That's because I don't think that's kind, I don't like to be unkind and I think there's a big difference between being thoughtful actually being able to name what's in front of you and what you think about it, and being unnecessarily unkind. And I don't like when people do that to me. I don't want to do it to other people.
Speaker 1:Do you think that when I do my show, I'm being unkind?
Speaker 2:I would say I have occasionally heard things that if I were the target, they would hurt my feelings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think you're an unkind person and I don't think there's an unkind tone or intention in general, but there's, there's definitely. I definitely think there's a possibility for receiving a kind of honesty about yourself. That can hurt even if it is, even if on reflection, you will know it's true. And I do also think that, like sometimes people are not in a place where they are able to parse out which of the two it is, like they might just be only hurt by it and unable to be helped by it right away.
Speaker 1:Are you so okay, okay.
Speaker 2:I understand that, but, like I mean, a big part of your brand is authenticity.
Speaker 1:It's not my brand, it's myself.
Speaker 2:Okay, a big part of the chat experience is authenticity. No, but I mean, like you're, like you say at the top of the show, this is the show where we subvert expectations. That's what you say, more or less, yeah. And you also say, like when you have a guest on, you say I want to get them, I want to, I want to. You know, I want to dig to the point where I hear like the real takes and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, that's what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Well, I just find that there's a there's so much unsaid subtext in our actual day to day interactions and I do believe that part of someone's writing and their voice comes from like the subtext, like what they know that's being left unsaid about society and how we interact with each other. And I will say again, like you know, your observations within that subtext are so they have such a point of view, right, they are, and they are on fire, Like they are blowtorching, Like the book is on fire because it has your point of view in it. So I guess this is a question of philosophy, which is like, if you, if you know that you stand on those things so much as being true, how can they then not be acceptable for someone to hear in their ears?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I mean, I have a few thoughts about this, so number one is that, like I don't think and I even less now than maybe 10 years ago I do not feel confident that just because I feel something or think something that it's right or that I'm going to still feel it in three years. For example.
Speaker 4:You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:So I would not want to.
Speaker 2:So that's one thing.
Speaker 2:I don't necessarily feel that my opinion has any more weight than whatever the counterpoint to that opinion is, and yeah, so that's a thing that has been especially true, I would say, from this shift, you know, from not being a parent to becoming a parent, like a really easy low hanging example, is that I, like a lot of people, had tons of opinions about what parenting would be like, what people should or shouldn't do with their little kids, and all that stuff, and all of that has been upended in a way that makes me look at other stuff that I feel sure about and think, well, okay, maybe once I cross that bridge it's gonna, you know, I will cross other bridges in the same way.
Speaker 2:There's that. Another thing is that with fiction, which is where I kind of choose to express, like my spicy takes is you're calling them like one thing that the book does and we're moving on from the book kind of. But, like you know, you can write a story that expresses a point of view by depicting events, and then you have enough control to express the opposite point of view by depicting events from the other side, or whatever, or by providing some objective truth or something to center it in there, and so I think what I'm a lot more interested in doing is describing what I see versus criticizing what I see, you know.
Speaker 1:In writing. Well in text. You are blowtorching these niggas faces off because they're phony and because they're acting crazy. You don't do not want me to say this.
Speaker 2:I mean I'll say I'm not gonna put names on it, but like I know what it is like.
Speaker 1:You know um recently. You know and and you and I we fixate. You know what I mean, like we pick a thing and we spend 30 days, like um, singeing it to ashes, basically right In our conversations. Do you define that?
Speaker 2:I mean, you're really fiery and cindy area language on it. He said blowtorch, singeing it to ashes.
Speaker 1:Imagine if someone read our text thread how they would, how it would scourge their fucking retinas. Okay, what I'm saying is, I'm just gonna get to the point of it, which is, um, we have, rachel, caught us film snobs last night.
Speaker 2:She did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she did I didn't hear Okay. Um, rachel is our cousin who was here on Thursday show and oh yeah, because he said Marvel, yeah sucks. And yeah, and, and what it feels related to is like what Morgan.
Speaker 2:I like Marvel oh what an upset glaring over on the other side of the road, and West does too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, so, so, okay. I am of the opinion that if people put something on the internet, yeah it is available to be blowtorched.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm, I'm with you, but that does not mean that I have to be the one to publicly do it.
Speaker 1:I'm not done. I'm not done.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 1:I'm off the. I respect your boundaries around how you want to express your points.
Speaker 2:Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Um, my point is we have been commenting, we have been giving observation to the way that people represent themselves, particularly on social media and in content lately. Right, I'm gonna, shannon, I'm gonna, not gonna do anything bad here.
Speaker 4:Shannon is.
Speaker 1:I'm watching my sister show me she's, she's giving me the um mannerisms that tell me she's nervous about what I'm about to say. Um, but you don't have to be, I'll ask the question broadly. I think you and I almost like double and triple down on trying to be authentic in how we represent ourselves. In some ways, almost like, maybe in a way that can slow you down a little bit, I'll speak for myself. I think some things could have happened faster if I was willing to just like ride the train on, like being whoever somebody wanted me to be so I could be right next to them.
Speaker 1:Okay, recently we see a lot like we've been talking about people straining on the internet, people, um, you know, putting up camera on themselves and trying so hard to be interesting, trying so hard to have a point of view, trying so hard to look a certain way and it's just not working. And, more than anything, like it makes me feel uncomfortable. Like, looking at it makes me feel uncomfortable. Um, that is something that also tweaks you. Like that's something that also you don't like. Why do you not like it? What is what does it tweak? What does it make you feel?
Speaker 2:What does it make If I see someone straining? If you see somebody?
Speaker 1:just just go where I'm trying to take you, shannon, okay, you're doing the move. Just go where I'm trying to take you.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to understand the question because I don't actually mind if I, just if I see someone straining, if I see someone.
Speaker 2:I mean, what bothers me on the internet is when I see someone trying to sell me self doubt and self criticism, which I think is there a very wide swath of what I am seeing on the internet, and our algorithms are different, of course, but I, like you, know my experience with Instagram a little bit less so right now, because I feel good about myself because I just published a book, but a lot of my Instagram experience, for maybe like the two years prior to this, were that I would be on there not really enjoying myself and often like feeling very close to tears because of how much self you know, I mean, my algorithm is selling me like you are not doing well enough.
Speaker 2:That's what my algorithm is giving me and I think that, like that is what people are being right now incentivized to sell on on social media. They are trying to show you mirrors that are you know they're not distorted. I mean I think that they're like accurate mirrors, like very well lit, blemishes and all that stuff, and they are doing that by showing you what they are doing that is so carefully curated that there's no space for what your experience looks like in there. So that's what gives me, that's what I tweak on on on the internet. If people are doing things and they look they look silly or they are cringy or whatever, like I actually find that in some ways comforting. I can watch that for a lot longer than I can. The other thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, that is a better way of saying what I was trying to say, which is like you don't like people trying to it's. We talked about airburgers. You don't like people trying to sell you an airburger by making you feel shitty about yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And you know I mean like I'm a mom of small children, so a lot of what I get served is like that, extremely straight up the middle purple. Don't want to alienate the anti-vaxxers, but we also don't want to alienate the crunchy, you know, the silky moms. There you go, you know that's, yeah, that's what they call.
Speaker 2:Them is like crunchy moms and silky moms, we don't want to alienate anybody, so we're just going to give you the the nothingest that we possibly can and have you still feel like you're seeing something? This is also why I'm not trying to be like a mom influencer on the internet, because I don't. I both can't and don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:Word. Yeah, I don't yeah, great, well said. Okay, morgan, what's your question?
Speaker 4:My question was um, so your books about like a family and I think family dynamics, sibling dynamics, all of that is super interesting and in the past few years my family in particular has like really reflected on just our dynamics from like I was upbringing, and so I'm curious when you were writing this cause you said some of it is stories that you've had before how much of this changed in hindsight and also like how much of it, as you had kids, also changed the stories because you know you have new knowledge, maybe like you've sat with something longer, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely so. There's 13 stories in the book. I would say six or eight of them were written or almost written before. No, I'll say six of them were written before 2018, which is when I had my first son, and those stories, like I was still doing that same kind of multi-generational thing, like the stories still involved mothers, daughters, you know, aunties and nieces and even grandmothers.
Speaker 2:And then there's a period like between 2016 or 2017, when I was expecting my first son, and like 2020, when I was raising a toddler, where there's this shift and like suddenly concerns about parenting and like the choice about whether to become a parent and the choice about you know how to approach those early years of parenting, like those things start to really become central to the stories. And then also this thing about the way that being a parent, the shift from parent to grandparent, which I could see like my own mom going through and like in some ways really struggling with, I think, because there's a loss of agency that happens there those things like definitely can affect it, like the character of those middle four stories. And then I had a thing that was like I really wanted to finish writing the book that I had started and so I had twins after that, so then we had three kids and I really felt like I wanted to try to find my way back to the person I was when I was writing those early stories and I felt like in some ways that perspective had shifted so much that I almost felt like I was writing a different book, and so that was a little bit of a struggle, was like trying to finish the last few stories still in the frame of mind of the person that I felt like I had been a few years earlier. But yeah, I mean like the way that I thought about family dynamics.
Speaker 2:I have always been a very close observer, I think, of the way that those things happen and like around holiday gatherings, for example, road trips, family reunions. When we were growing up we used to go on family reunion trips and they would always put me in the car with my dad and Chad and my mom and her sister and their, their you know, their mother would ride in a different car and they would always say ride with your brother and your dad. And I would be like but I want to hear the, I want to hear the goss, I want to hear what we didn't have goss you didn't have goss.
Speaker 2:There was none. There's not happening. It would be like about, like you know, oh, look, there's a bar, there's a cow.
Speaker 1:Wow, oh my God, that's not true. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:I wanted to sit at like the grown up table at the holiday dinners and stuff. Eventually that changed because Chad's a great conversationalist. He's a lot of fun. But as a kid, like I wanted to be like absorbing, I wanted to be. I was I mean, I was a huge eavesdropper. So I wanted to like hear what they were talking about when we weren't there, which, of course, you can never do you know.
Speaker 2:But yeah, things shifted a lot in those years as I, as I kind of, as I moved through like my late 20s, early 30s and then into now.
Speaker 4:It's interesting that it didn't help, though it was almost like baggage, like it was the opposite effect of like what I would have thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And then I mean like I will write. I mean I'm working on my next book and that book. I feel like I'm starting that at this phase and I mean I guess you can't really avoid that it takes years to write a book. Most of the time I think so you're gonna change as a person as it's coming together. But yeah. I do try to hold onto some consistency, in some sense of like where I was, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great questions, morgan, all right. Is there anything else you wanna say about anything?
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan of the podcast. Thanks, keep up the good work. I'm, like, the biggest fan of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Shannon listens to every episode of Anarchy multiple times.
Speaker 2:I do, I do do it. Everyone's doing great work. Morgan, josh, walter, chad. Keep it up.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Well, this is nothing but Anarchy. We just had a great conversation with my sister, Shannon Sanders, whose debut collection of short stories collection of short stories company is available everywhere that you get books right now. And, Shannon, what's the next stop on your book tour?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna be in Baltimore next weekend at the Greedy Reads Lost Weekend Festival with some other very cool local authors, so lots of authors coming. If you're in the Baltimore area you can get a lot of things for your book. Come see everybody.
Speaker 1:Amazing Shannon, thanks for being here. We love you, we're so excited for you and we'll see all y'all next week on Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Let's ask Shannon some questions about sports ball. Hit me. Okay, let's see. Will Sauce Gardener is out tomorrow, no, I know, and they're paying the Eagles, which is a really good team, obviously, yeah. So how do you think? What do you think Go birds? What do you think will be the Eagles wide receivers, productivity with no Sauce Gardener out there?
Speaker 2:I don't know how they can do it without Sauce Gardener Sauce.
Speaker 1:Gardener Okay, yeah, no, I feel you Also. So Travis Kelsey has been nursing, I know you know him.
Speaker 2:I know, yeah, I know, mr Swift.
Speaker 1:Yes, he has an ankle injury. They played on Thursday night so he's gonna get about 10 days to rest before their next game. But do you think they're gonna get him back at 100% productivity this year?
Speaker 2:I think even if they don't get him back at 100%, they're gonna put him in anyway.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, thank you. Great job, shannon.
Speaker 2:Thanks, thanks, chad.
Speaker 1:Hey, thanks for listening to my conversation with my sister Shannon, about her debut book Company. It's a collection of short stories and I'm about to read an excerpt from the first story in the book, the Good Good Men. Miles suppressed a shiver. Still in a glance at his brother's outstretched arm, he saw an arc of freshly inked letters at the biceps disappearing beneath a fitted sleeve. Lauren, who maintained aggressive Facebook surveillance of all her in-laws, had kept Miles apprised of each of Theo's new tattoos for years, Undeterred by Miles' disinterest. Only this last had caught his attention. Bad stakeholder analysis. Is that what it was Theo was muttering Last time? I mean, what's the new tattoo, asked Miles, pointing. Theo blanked at the graceless transition, then obligingly pushed up his sleeve, got it in Los Angeles on a work trip. A girl I was with talked me into it. I've been thinking about this one for years. He traced his finger around the lettered circle. Four words rendered to look like they'd been scrawled by hand in a familiar chicken scratch Miles, delonious Mary, olive, caprice For us, obviously, but where'd you get Daddy's handwriting to show the tattoo artist? Theo let the sleeve drop and folded his arms across his chest. From a check he sent to the old house for us with our names in the memo line. I found it in a stack of Lee's work papers with a bunch of other ones and took it when I went to New York. It was in my wallet. When I went on the Los Angeles trip, miles felt a swell of heat, despite the frigid air. You took a check from her and never gave it back. Did you not hear me? It was with a bunch of other ones and it was about eight years old. All the checks were years and years old, some of them reissues from older ones. He would write that in the memo line, he would send them and she would put them some place idiotic, like tucked in the finished crossword puzzle or a pile of old magazines, and then, I guess, lose them. So he had to write new ones. She was always doing that kind of shit with checks. I found this one and the others all mixed in with the girl's old coloring books. I took one and left the others there for her to find never. Is that okay with you?
Speaker 1:Theo's posture had gone rigid. His face turned squarely in Miles' direction. Miles took his eyes off the road long enough to stare back, but like a traveler gone too long from his hometown for getting its habits and idioms. He had lost his fluency in the quirks of his brother's face. At one time he'd been able to tell from the slightest twitch of an eyelid that Theo had been teased past his threshold and was about to cry To hear an impending temper tantrum in the sharpness of his inhale. All that was years ago, when any impulse would buzz between them like a current felt by one brother even before the other acted on it. When a germ passed to either inevitably would invade the other. All that was years ago, when any impulse would buzz between them like a current felt by one brother even before the other acted on it. When a germ passed to either inevitably would invade the other. A far away, definitively ended time. The composition of Theo's face was the same as always Brooding features assembled slickly under a strong brow. But now it was like their father's face in the pictures Impassive, all traces of thought as strange and unreadable as hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1:Lee had a new man, ugan this one, a fellow patron at the karaoke bar where she'd been throwing away money every week for months. It was known that he makes good homemade cocktails and spoke a little French, which was probably what had done her in because he wasn't particularly good looking and didn't seem like anyone's genius. He had a dog as big as a wolf supposedly, and for some reason wore too much purple and a signet ring on his little finger. Miles' spotty intel had come from Mary. Olive and Caprice, who were working innocently but in tandem, were only a bit more effective than either of them was separately. Lauren, for her expert stalking efforts, couldn't find even a single Facebook reference to supplement what little was known about her mother-in-law's new relationship.
Speaker 1:It was not known where the new man came from, what he did for a living or what wives and children lay crumbled in his wake, nor what in God's name he was doing making regular appearances at karaoke bars if not trolling for knives like Lee. But without question he had established himself as a regular at Lee's new house in the suburbs, as evidenced by his car's presence there. On each of four spot checks Miles had conducted upon receipt of the intelligence, it was there on a Sunday afternoon, a black sedan parked casually in the carport behind Lee's dented Ford Explorer. There again the following Thursday as Miles inched homeward past the wire cross neighborhood in the brush hour traffic there on a Friday after dark, the lights on in the little house behind it, a hint of movement within, and then confirming Miles' nauseated suspicions. There again the next morning at sunup, the house still and silent, mary Olive had said. At least this one has a car, which was more than could be said of a certain previous one, like the one who needed Lee to drive up to Philadelphia once a week to try to see his estranged son, or the one who'd put the dents in the Ford Explorer driving down I-95 in the dark after cocktails.
Speaker 1:But still a grown man, well past any definition of middle age, living unashamedly off. A woman with air between her ears, who lived by the word of her daily horoscope and always kept a tambourine handy to punctuate moments of spontaneous group laughter. And also a karaoke bar, an unforgivable fall into the solace and vulgar. Lee had met their father at a district jazz lounge that no longer existed, a place Miles had long imagined as dark and deliciously moody, like the man himself, with threads of light piano melody curling through the air between sets.
Speaker 1:He was the Mikhail third of the regular Tuesday night trio. Somebody, somebody. And Mikhail Miles thought he would never forgive Lee for this offense alone, her willful forgetting of the group's full name which no amount of internet searching could recover the long finger bassist who looked a little like Gil Scott Herron and stood almost as tall as his instrument. Mikhail never talked between sets, but he had a smile like a swallow of top shelf whiskey. Lee had learned from him. Lee had learned from him about melody and improvisation, about modality, how bebop could crush you, how the blues could lift you. From that, she had found her way, albeit over some 35 years, into the drunken sump of some suburban karaoke bar, a place whereby a very expectation the music was shit ondevi. Thanks for watching, guys.
