Writer Showcase: Shannon Sanders' Best Work

A summer interview series, volume 11.

My collage skills are Not Great, y’all.

Today’s writer showcase series features Shannon Sanders, an extraordinarily gifted writer and very busy mom whom I’ve had the privilege of befriending via… you guessed it, social media. Twitter may have descended into Hades but the connections it fostered are still so strong for many of us who are weirdly addicted to microblogging! Shannon writes at The Red Eye about the process of writing while in a deeply demanding stage of parenting. I look forward avidly to each newsletter she sends out, and I think you will too. She is also the author of Company, a linked short story collection which I will be reviewing here shortly, and the forthcoming The Great Wherever, her debut novel (releasing in 2026).

What do you write about?

I'm a fiction writer, first and foremost—I process my experiences and feelings by inventing totally new ones! It's my favorite thing to do, and I hope I get to do it forever. Most of my fiction centers on one of a few things: being Black in the United States, being a Millennial in the post-capitalist era, and/or being a woman in patriarchy. Within those really broad realms, I tend to write a lot about family dynamics—I'm one of only two siblings, but we’re part of a large extended family, and I’m fascinated by ordinal positioning and how it impacts personality, worldview, and experience. I’m also a shameless lover of gossip! I love to write stories about loaded microdramas—incidents that seem small but reveal so much subtext and character detail. And my fiction is usually multigenerational; I like to show how events can reverberate for decades.

Something that’s become super clear to me over a decade of interacting with other writers is that we all have our inescapable obsessions! No matter how hard we try to steer our writing in various directions, we always come back to certain topics that live at the core of our imaginations. I’ll share one of mine: My fiction tends to heavily feature the aunt-niece relationship. Something about it is so inspiring to me! I think it has to do with the idea of being linked to this other person by way of a third person you both know so intimately, but in such different ways. Your parent's sister understands things about them that you never will, but (if she's worth her salt) she'll never tell. I have maternal and paternal aunts, plus lots of aunties (close, lifelong friends of my parents'), so I have a lot of material to draw from here!

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

See above—I didn't necessarily choose any of it! I think a lot of writers are writers specifically because they are deeply bothered by preoccupations they can't deal with otherwise. I write about things I'm interested in, that make me laugh, and that I think I can render with truth.

That said, I feel very lucky to be living in a moment (though, as of summer 2025, it's an evolving moment) in which writers who aren't straight white men are being celebrated for the perspectives we offer. I'm excited to be able to reach readers who want something new to relate to!

How long have you been writing for the internet?

I have a newsletter on beehiiv, and I haven't been writing on it for very long. I started it this past March because I wanted to chronicle the tail end of the book tour for the paperback edition of my fiction debut, Company. It's taken me a while to fall into a groove, but lately I'm aiming to post every Tuesday or as often as possible!

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I've been so lucky! I have work in a bunch of literary magazines and journals. In addition to the work listed below, my short stories appear in One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Southeast Review, and a few other places that are no less important, just less recent. (You can find more of them listed here!)

I suppose I should mention here that I have a novel, THE GREAT WHEREVER, coming out next summer, and that you can get my debut short-story collection, Company, wherever books are sold (preferably an independent bookstore)!

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

(I'm going to limit myself to pieces you can read entirely online! The first three are short stories, and the last one is an essay.)

"Dragonflies" (read by LeVar Burton!!!!): This was truly the first serious "pinch me" moment of my writing career. I grew up on Reading Rainbow and have loved a lot of Mr. Burton's other work, and I was over the moon when I learned that he would be reading one of my short stories on his podcast. It's a story I'm proud of, and if you stick around through the end you'll hear him offering some really complimentary commentary (he says the story makes him feel seen!!). Truly a dream. This story first appeared in a beautiful magazine called SLICE (sadly not around anymore), and is also in my collection.

"Mote": This is a slightly creepy short story I wrote to explore a few things I was thinking about in the fall of 2019, when my first child was a toddler and I had recently moved back to the suburb where I grew up after spending a few years living in the city. It's a triptych, each segment shorter but more punchy than the last, and I think it's a lot of fun!

"Company": This is the title story of my collection. People call it a ghost story, but that's open to interpretation. I was so proud to publish this in Strange Horizons! I feel strongly that writers shouldn't feel any pressure to limit ourselves to any particular genre labels, literary included.

"Writing on Prepaid Time": I published this essay in Lithub while promoting my first book, and it resonated with a lot of writer-parents. It gets into the nuts and bolts of how I stumbled through the early days of trying to write with three small kids.

Who is one other newsletter writer you admire?

Claire Taylor has a beehiiv newsletter, Other Thoughts, that's exactly aligned with everything I enjoy reading about. (Parenting, publishing, and mental health.) Here's a great representative post, Part of the Problem.

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Amy again. I’m in awe of

Shannon Sanders

’ work ethic and the quality of her work, and I’m honored that she took the time to do this interview! I love how Shannon’s writing is so simple yet so thought-provoking; she manages to do a lot with just a few well-placed descriptors that leave a lingering effect. I first read “Mote” over two years ago and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I’m going to recommend I Don’t Think You Should Take a Vow of Poverty to Write, because I really enjoyed how Shannon wrote so accessibly about practicality and art and how they intersect (and have no choice but to get along, for most of us). Subscribe to The Red Eye wherever you get your emails, and be on the lookout for The Great Wherever in 2026!