The Brooklyn Rail

“He’s company,” one character quips to her boyfriend, urging him to clean up a visiting guest’s mess in the bathroom. The boyfriend responds that, no, he doesn’t have to, because “he’s family.”

But is there a difference? Do the obligations change if so? What do we owe each other—what story will our actions or inactions tell—particularly in the private space of our homes?

These are some of the central questions explored in Shannon Sanders’s insightful debut, a linked short story collection aptly titled, Company.

The book opens with the fictional Collins Family Tree, handwritten by Sanders’s own mother, priming the reader for the intimacy of the words to come. Yet paired with that intimacy are characters concerned with the role perception may play as they strive to forge their path in a world that’s not always welcoming. The characters in this collection are either members of the Collins Family, a multigenerational Black family spread across the Northeast, or in their orbit.

Over a mid-morning Zoom call, Shannon and I spoke about the thrills and challenges of linked story collections, shifting roles within a family system, and writing endings.

Shannon Perri (Rail): The stories in your collection have not one but two links—they revolve around the multigenerational Collins family, and each story includes, in some way, the arrival of a guest. Did you start writing this book with both of these conceits in mind, or did they arise later?

Shannon Sanders: I started writing the stories in 2016, and I didn’t have any intention of putting them together at the beginning. The first story in the book, “The Good, Good Men,” was the first story I wrote chronologically. When I wrote the next story, the title story, “Company,” I remember thinking it would be fun to connect the two stories and reuse a character that I wanted to explore from a different angle. After that, I would grab a character from a story and check in to see what else they were up to. It wasn’t until I had several—I would say between six and eight of them written—that I started to think about compiling them. Even then, someone else had to point out to me that all of the stories involved the whole guest-host connection.

Rail: Though it wasn’t a conscious choice, the idea of “company” or someone entering another’s private space clearly intrigued you.

Sanders: None of that was obvious to me, that all of the stories were about that interaction between guests and hosts and the performance anxiety that comes up when we’re in those roles. One of the other thematic linkages between the stories is the tension between the generations and the way that parents, and in this case specifically the baby boomers, have these disappointments or expectations of their kids, who in this book are mostly millennials. In my experience, at least one of the areas where that comes up is when I’m about to either be a host or a guest, because we’re out there, representing our families, our communities. There are all of these expectations as far as self-presentation. What are we going to look like? How well-groomed are we going to be? How are we going to use discretion? What are we going to choose to share with the world? I wanted to explore ways that can look different, depending on the scenario. There’s a story where there’s an academic party going on, and that’s one kind of heap of expectations. There’s another story where a sister drops in unannounced out of the blue, and what role do we have to play to be sisterly or to be a comfort to someone in a moment of need? There are just so many expectations, especially for the women characters in the book. So many different drop-of-a-hat sudden things that we have to do to fit into the expected rules.

Rail: The characters often compare themselves to others and worry how people will judge them—or those close to them—as a reflection. Could you speak more about this preoccupation with perception?

Sanders: So, these are mostly Black characters in the community that I live in, which is right outside of DC. Some are actually in DC and some are in New York, and those are both spaces where you see a multi-class environment. People rubbing together from different classes and people who are really striving toward one thing or whatever. One of the big things that a lot of these characters experience is they have to present themselves in a certain way in order to be deserving of these communities’ benefits. There’s the story, “The Opal Cleft,” where Theo has burned out of an investment banker career. He is evaluating how he should express himself now and how that’s going to end up. Some people easily get a second chance and others have to really work. Sometimes their backgrounds prejudice people against them and then they have to earn their way back into the fold. Even though all these characters are in different sectors and from different generations, they all face this. They’re all having to figure out how to maximize the way that the outside world perceives them. Or, in some cases, deciding that they don’t feel like doing that. There’s at least a couple of characters who are just, like, “screw it. I don’t care. I’m going to wear what I want, present the way that I want, and you can take or leave it,” and then reaping the consequences of that.

Rail: One of the thrills of a linked collection is witnessing characters at different phases from different vantage points, like Theo. I loved the handwritten family tree at the start of the collection. Its inclusion prepared me to think of this book in terms of the family system. Throughout, we see these family patterns, repudiations, and reconfigurations. Adult children care for their parents, a new matriarch ascends after the death of her mother. Was examining the family system part of the motivation for writing a linked collection?

Sanders: For sure. I’m a huge fan of that feeling of, like, the “easter egg” of finding something in one story that you recognize from another. I was excited about the idea of getting to do that. It opens up a lot of fun story elements because of course roles and perspectives do change over time. When I was writing a couple of these stories, I was also becoming a parent. I had my son in 2018, right around when I wrote “The Gatekeepers” and “Dragonflies,” and both of them involve that inherent conflict in having to re-examine where you fit into your family. The mother becoming the grandmother and suddenly not having as much control over her son’s choices. The other mother becoming the caretaker and ultimately the bereaved daughter of the grandmother. Another character in “Dragonflies” is trying to decide whether to become a parent. All of that stuff is really interesting and it’s at its most interesting, in my opinion, when you get to see multiple perspectives. There’s more dimension that comes from viewing that mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of both the mother and the daughter.

In the case of “The Gatekeepers,” I showed that one to my mom after it was first published, and she really identified with the character of the mother-turned-grandmother. She was like, but wait a minute, if you know that this is hard for the grandmother, why don’t you make it easier for me in real life? That’s one of the most fun parts of being a writer is that you can see something and know it and try your best to render it even if you also understand that other perspectives might be different. I actually had my mom handwrite that family tree for me. She’s an artist and has much better penmanship than I do.

Rail: The book spans time and includes many different points-of-view. How did you decide on the sequencing and structuring of the book?

Sanders: I came into it expecting this to be really, really difficult. I know that writers of short story collections put a lot of thought into how they’re going to sequence, just like musicians do with their albums.

I knew I wanted to start with a strong story, and my agent and editor both felt that it should be that first one because it won a PEN prize, and I wanted to end with a note of hopefulness. The last story in the collection is “The Everest Society,” and no spoilers or anything, but I wanted to leave the reader feeling happy for this family. Then I had heard that you want to have an anchor story that is somewhere south of the middle of the collection to really arrest the reader’s attention and make sure that they’re still with you. I wanted to put that big title story there. It’s third from last and I thought that that was a good place to resolve some questions that would have come up about the characters and their origins. Once I had the beginning, the end, and then the anchor story figured out, the book kind of sequenced itself.

Like I said earlier, I wrote about eight of the stories before I started to query, so at that point I already had the general structure. I got an agent, and she suggested that I add a couple more, and then when I signed with Graywolf, they requested that I add a couple more stories as well. So, there were these three different phases of writing. Those stories that I wrote once the book had been acquired, those were to fill in holes, so that was pretty simple. If I were to do it again, it would be a completely different experience.

Rail: You mentioned “The Everest Society,” which I absolutely loved. An elevator is a central object in that last story, and in fact, tangible objects serve as powerful elements throughout the collection, whether it be the dragonflies, the elevator, or the recurring opal necklace. How do you see objects functioning in your work?

Sanders: I don’t want these to seem like materialistic characters, but the objects you mentioned, at least two of them, are pieces of jewelry, and jewelry often in literature and in real life is a motif for that idea of inheritance because you’ve got, you know, four daughters, but one piece of jewelry. Only one person’s going to get it, and in many ways, that is a stand-in for other things, like property or attention. I have three sons and I’m always thinking about if I only have one or even two of something, what am I going to do? How am I going to make sure that that works out in an even way? Personally, I love jewelry, I think it’s a fun way to self-express, but in terms of the book, it’s something that’s really sensory. Hopefully it’s easy to get the reader to see it in a vivid way and then show different depictions, how a piece of jewelry is being treated well or mistreated.

Rail: What intrigues you most about sibling relationships?

Sanders: I have one brother, and Theo’s character is loosely based on him. He moved to New York. He had a tech career for a while. He’s an artist now and a writer. But I think that the sibling relationship is such an interesting one. In some ways, it’s really singular in that it is lateral. There’s not necessarily an inherent authority built into it. I mean, there’s research about how birth order can affect your personality, or doesn’t at all, depending on who you believe. I thought it was fun to explore that. We have a pair of brothers, a pair of twins, a pair of sisters who are very much in that big sister-little sister relationship. Then we have the four central sisters who are in their fifties and sixties as the book unfolds. The roles that they’ve had since childhood have really baked in. It’s inescapable after a certain point. With four sisters, somebody gets designated the X, and somebody gets designated the Y. However unfair that might be, it tends to attach itself, and then people spend their lives either leaning into it or resisting it. All of that is fertile for story writing.

Rail: I was struck by your artful endings. Sometimes they surprised me, but they always felt satisfying. When you write, do you tend to have the ending in mind before? Or does it come in revision?

Sanders: There are at least a few endings that people find surprising in these stories. My process is that I almost always write toward an ending. I might have a plot point, a line, an image, but I start with that. Then the question becomes, what do I need to build first for this story and the way that I’m seeing it? I know that’s one of two broad ways that people approach story writing. I recently did a panel discussion with another short story writer, and she was talking about how she never has an end in mind and just lets the characters tell her where the story is going to go. And while that sounds fun, it also sounds really harrowing to me. I find it more exciting and satisfying to have an ending in mind and take incremental steps toward it, finding the ways in which it’s going to become more and more resonant.

In terms of surprise with what is and isn’t included, in at least a couple of these stories, there’s something that the characters are anticipating or that they’re working toward, and for me, in those cases, the story is more about what that anticipation or that concern says about the characters than it is about the outcome. I’ve had a lot of experiences of talking to first readers who are like, but I want to see what happens next, and I find that readers will let you know if they think something is missing, and they will let you know what they think is missing. Sometimes they’re right that something’s missing, but they’re not right about what it is. The challenge becomes if someone says, well wait, you stopped before you got to the scene with XYZ. What they’re really saying is that they were not necessarily satisfied by what they did get in the story, and then the job becomes to go back and make it satisfying, and so I tried hard to do that here. I felt strongly that I did not want to resolve some of the tensions that the characters were experiencing because sometimes the tension itself is the story.