The Man in the Banana Trees, a collection of 18 stories, plunges readers directly into Marguerite Sheffer’s off-kilter world of speculative fiction, in which mischievous ghosts haunt corporate retreats, puppets go to school, Christmas decorations stage mutinies, and astronomers fall in love. To Sheffer’s great surprise—though her mentors and writing peers were far less shocked—her collection won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award, a welcome recognition of Sheffer’s inventive storytelling prowess after a decade-long hiatus from writing. Sheffer and I sat down to talk about why fiction is worthwhile even when it feels like the world is falling apart, how she finds time to write amidst a full-time job and family, and why art becomes richer when you stop trying to hack your own productivity.
First off—congratulations on your first book and this prize. Can you tell me how you got started in creative writing?
I have always loved reading and writing. I would pretend to be a writer when I was a little kid, and I would write stories. I would get in trouble for having a book under my desk in class. I went to college at Barnard, and I was an English major with a creative writing concentration. One of my professors, Mary Gordon, I believe, said to all of us—”Don’t do an MFA or try to publish right away. Do something else with your life for a while.” It was such fun to be around other talented young writers, but we hadn’t done anything yet; there wasn’t much to write about. So I took that advice to heart, and I spent the next 10 years as an English teacher, which I also really loved. The plan was always to write in the summer, to do this passionate work of teaching English in the school year and write in the evenings and summers. And that definitely didn’t happen, because teaching was very all-consuming. And it was really fulfilling, and I loved it, but I really didn’t write for about 10+ years.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, Maurice Carlos Ruffin had posted about how special a place the Randolph low-residency MFA program was. I was a huge fan of his, so I checked it out and I applied immediately—I think it was the last day applications were open; it was down to the wire. I applied, I got in, and I decided to go all during the pandemic. Everything was going remote, but that’s also what made it possible for me. My job at that point was working for an education nonprofit, and at that point no one wanted what we were doing, sadly, as schools were in turmoil, and the money and contracts were gone. So I suddenly had this weird window, and I had always said if I had a window of time and money, an MFA would be the thing I wanted to do. So I had to fess up and actually try it.
Can you talk about how you decided on these stories for the collection, and the process of turning these separate entities into a book?
This book had a unique journey, as the contest was the impetus to make a collection. I wouldn’t have said I was sitting on a short story collection. I saw the call for the contest, [that] it was free, and that you could apply multiple years in a row. The person who was judging it [for 2024] was Jamil Jan Kochai, who wrote The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, and it was my favorite book that year, so I thought, I have to try this year. I was thinking of it as a practice year. I took everything I had ever written in order to make the page number minimum, including some stories that I did not feel were done, but it was just the deadline. I was flabbergasted when it turned out that I won. I am very proud of it; I don’t mean to be negging myself in any way. I was proud of all the stories, but I really hadn’t been thinking of them as a collection.
I do see some threads emerging among the stories, though. You write a lot about social concerns and social justice. There is the role of the arts in people’s lives, climate change, AI and technology, the position of children in the school system and other institutions.
That does sound right, especially the theme of what adults owe to children and how often we don’t deliver on that promise. I think it’s something I’ve been obsessed with and felt very deeply for many years. After spending years in a classroom, I was really interested in turning that narrative of teacher-saviors on its head. In the book, there’s some teachers who are great, but there’s also several teachers who are varying degrees of less-than-great or actively harmful to their students. And that was always one of my darkest fears. That’s something I faced in the book—the ways in which, even with the best of intentions, teachers can harm or fail to protect their students.
One thing the book plays with is: We often say we’re doing things for children’s best interests, but it’s actually for adult convenience. A lot of what children thrive on is inconvenient for the adult world. In the stories, it’s been great to privilege those youth voices and show how adults fail them. Having been a teacher for many years and working at the Taylor Center [for Social Innovation and Design Thinking, at Tulane], I’ve learned that a lot of the change-making, social justice work involves compromise. In art, you get to think about what it would be like to never compromise. In writing, I get the final say, and I never have to compromise the way I do in all the day jobs I’ve ever had.
That’s interesting—a completely different level of agency. Is this what draws you to fiction?
I think one thing I love about fiction is that you get to raise questions. A lot of the stories in the book are about things that keep me up late at night, where I can feel that something is wrong, and I truly don’t know what course of action is the right one. I’m not an essay writer for a reason. I think stories are a great way to deal with ambiguity and complexity because there are often no answers that feel totally right. But stories convey those truths that are more murky.
Have you always written in the speculative genre? Your stories represent a wide range—there are stories with ghosts and imaginary creatures, and then others that are much more realistic with subtle elements of fantasy.
I always loved science fiction and fantasy as a reader, and [as] a TV show and movie watcher. A ton of what I read and most of the authors I admire are either totally in the speculative genre or kind of in that borderline genre between speculative and literary fiction. Sofia Samatar comes to mind, Ken Liu, Ted Chiang, Susanna Clarke. Those are some of those all-stars in my brain that, anything they write, I will read.
Two of your stories are inspired by historical events; both are related to marginalized women who weren’t immediately recognized for their achievements. I’m curious about how you found out about these histories, and also your process of turning those events into something absolutely new, with a completely different story and framing.
The story “The Observer’s Cage” is very loosely inspired by the actual discovery of pulsars [rapidly rotating neutron stars that blast out pulses of radiation at regular intervals]. I had been struggling with a totally different story about astronomers in love, and I was just so stuck on it that I went to the New Orleans Public Library and I got a big book about the history of astronomy. I was flipping through it and happened to find a few images related to pulsars. I was so taken by them, and the one little nugget of truth that’s in the story is inspired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She’s the one who discovered pulsars and was not awarded the Nobel Prize. I didn’t want to feel like I was working against anyone’s real-life reputation… so I stopped researching and started writing. A danger I often think about when writing historical fiction is that the real-life stories are sometimes more interesting than the ones I make up—so I encourage everybody to go check out the real story. The character in my story is totally different from the real Jocelyn Bell Burnell, but that scenario of a female astronomer making a massive discovery and not getting the credit is similar. Her graduate advisers got the credit and she was not awarded anything, though she did receive a lot of recognition later in life.
The other story you were referencing is “En Plein Air,” which is really a story about whiteness. It took a lot of drafts. It has a very different narrator, very different themes. There’s a character, Josephine, inspired by Clementine Hunter, who was an incredible painter. She was a Black artist—technically staff—at an all-white artist retreat [at the Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches] during the time she was painting her work. Unlike the painter in the book, she did get a lot of fame and acclaim during her life, but still later than when she was doing the actual work. The story is told from the perspective of one of the [white] artists, who is now a ghost and is haunting the former artists’ retreat. I loved that set-up. The initial spark came from when I was visiting the actual Melrose Plantation with a historian friend of mine. I didn’t know much about Clementine Hunter, but I learned a ton from being there, and I remember having this thought—if there were a ghost of one of the white painters, they would probably explode from jealousy because the whole place is now basically a museum to Clementine Hunter. She’s by far the most influential artist to have come out of this place. It was so rich for story.
That’s the fun of speculative fiction, right? You can take something out of history, make it into a fiction and put a ghost in there.
You can look at things really slanted and askew, which for me is where a lot of the fun comes in. You’re tilting something this many degrees to defamiliarize it. One thing I do also as a writer is change the names, change the state, change everything so that even though I want to make sure people know in the end notes that they should go check out Clementine Hunter’s paintings, I don’t feel as beholden to it as if I was using the name Natchitoches or Melrose Plantation. Who am I to reimagine that? There are also several stories set in New Orleans; I personally don’t like using the name, it kind of freezes me up. There are so many writers who do a great job of evoking New Orleans. I think because I like to write speculative and weird, I want the freedom to mess things up as much as I want.
I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the editing process for this book was like, once you were selected for this prize.
Because it was a prize, it was kind of a unique scenario. There were only copy-edits, and no content or literary edits. I will say, before this process, I thought I was good at grammar, and I realize now that I’m not. There were so many copy-edits! The [University of Iowa] press did a great job keeping in my voice and style, and I had the green light to refuse any edits. It was great to have someone go through it with a really fine-toothed comb.
Aside from writing, you have a full-time job teaching at Tulane. You’re also a parent and have a family. How is your writing schedule these days?
My schedule these days is completely fucked up, actually, because of the book. I used to have about an hour a day of writing, and that hour has been eaten up by book promo at the moment. Which I think is important to talk about, because I’m so thrilled to do this but it has also thrown my schedule totally out of whack. I am a big believer in writing in the morning, but having a little one makes that very, very hard, because she also wakes up very early in the morning. I’m still renegotiating. Sometimes I write on my lunch break; I often talk to my writing group about when we can write together to have that co-accountability. Writing in the margins of a very busy life, with a day job and kid, is basically how this whole book was written, and it’s gotten a little bit busier since then, so I’m struggling to keep up.
But somehow it did come together.
I think it’s really important to acknowledge that it came together largely in 30 minute increments. A lot of them were first drafted during Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer sprints, when I just wanted to get words on the page. And the stories got so many rejections. They are still coming in. The stories combined had more than 400 rejections before becoming an award-winning collection. I think that’s so important to share with other writers. I do believe it’s a numbers game.
I do want to ask you about Third Lantern Lit—you’re currently the vice president, and you’re also one of the group’s co-founders. I’d love to know how that group came to be and what your goals were.
So I think it was 2020 or 2021. I co-founded the group with Chanèl Etienne and Greta Hayer, two other amazing writers. We were really looking for ways to connect with peers. I had met Greta at a local course, which was great, but we didn’t have bottomless pockets and we wanted ways to meet other emerging writers and talk about writing without constantly paying for courses. So that was one thing we really set out with early on, that Third Lantern Lit events would be free or at cost, as much as we could make it that way. That still remains true today. We started as a series of meetups when restrictions during the pandemic were easing, so we could start meeting in person again. The idea was just to host meet-ups for writers and be really welcoming and warm to whoever came and just see what happened. [ANTIGRAVITY contributor] Danny Cherry, Jr. came to one of those first meet-ups and he’s now the president of the organization. It’s been wonderful, and it’s evolved a lot. We’re starting a reading series now, we’ve had two galas—well, galas is a funny word, it’s a costume party at a bar. We’re starting to partner with the Tennessee Williams Festival, which is amazing. I’ve just been excited by how many people find it valuable and have said they found their writing groups through those meetups. That was the whole point for people to make those connections in a way that felt accessible and safe and free. The free part is maybe the most important.
You have a novel in progress. It sounds absolutely wild. Anything you want to share about it?
Egret is a novel that merges some Gulf history with speculative fiction. It’s set in the late 1890s into the early 1900s in Louisiana, and the main character is a female journalist named Theodora Moore. Her beat is covering the near-extinction of egrets, due to overhunting at the time. Their feathers were worth a ton of money because they could be used for women’s hats. She goes to cover some early conservation efforts and learns a very dark secret that changes the rest of her life. I’m still actively drafting it, and it’s going to be my next big project. I’ve been working on it for many years now and I anticipate many more years.
How has that transition been, from focusing on short form stories to now working on a longer form piece?
I often feel like I’m cheating on the novel with short stories. It can be really gratifying to finish a short story and feel like, “Yes, I have nailed the thing I set out to do.” I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that way about a novel. There are so many threads, so many scenes, that even though I love writing it, sometimes I need a hit of short stories to keep going. I will say, I think the novel is very rich because Maggie from three years ago and Maggie two years from now will both have their hands in it. That long lifespan is part of what makes them wonderful, that’s another thing I’m learning. I thought that I could rush to the finish line by somehow hacking my own productivity, but I don’t think that’s leading me to do my best work. Actually, I think how much time a novel takes, and how much I have changed as a person over that time, is what makes it a little bit magical. My mentor Clare Beams said something similar to me once—a novel can be smarter than you, the writer, because it’s you across five years. I cannot at any one moment comprehend the whole thing. I’m learning that I shouldn’t rush it. The impulse to rush it and hack it isn’t doing the book any good, it’s just doing my calendar good and that’s not the ultimate goal.
I’ve seen the spreadsheet you use to track your work—you clearly take writing and submitting your work very seriously.
I think taking your writing seriously is such a challenge. There is so much imposter syndrome in the world of writers. No one, in my experience, ever feels like they’ve earned the right to call themselves a writer. I still don’t. No one will ever give you a badge and say, “Now you’re a real writer.” But I think now I can say from the other side, I had to be taking my writing seriously before I had any reason to, or else the book would not exist. And I’m so glad the book exists. So a lesson I’ve learned that I want to shout from the mountaintops is: Please take it seriously—all your creative urges, all your creative time, because no one else will do it for you. The work that validates your seriousness cannot exist unless you take that crazy leap and take it seriously before the work exists. It’s this crazy catch-22.
You might not get recognition or any kind of validation for some time, and you still have to do it.
You almost certainly won’t. And that’s also fine. There’s a reason I think I was writing about a lot of folk artists or outsider artists in this book who weren’t discovered in their lifetimes, because I was at a stage where it felt kind of crazy to be spending this much time doing art, when there’s so many other demands on your time… You pointed out earlier that there are a lot of stories about art and climate change. Sofia Samatar also writes about this really beautifully. It can feel crazy or even selfish to sit there writing a story when the world feels like it’s melting around you, and everything feels more urgent than writing a story. But at the same time, I still do it. And I still want to read other people’s stories. I actually co-teach a course with Sienna Abdulahad and Máille Faughnan called Speculative Fiction for Social Change. Rather than reading a lot of theory about changemaking or essays, we’re reading short stories and talking about those topics, and we’re having students write short stories, rather than essays, about issues they feel most passionately about—their biggest fears and hopes for the future, in some cases their biggest horror stories, like the ones I’ve written myself.
Do you have any long-term goals for your writing?
Fame and fortune would be great! But sometimes thinking about the career side of things can really freeze me up. My real goal is just to keep writing. I did 10 years without it, and I don’t want to stop again. I know that I’m a crankier person, a worse family member, and a less thoughtful member of society when I’m not writing and not connected to the writing world. I want to keep that channel open. I would love to have an agent, and for Egret the novel to be published and be on Oprah’s Book Club or whatever it is that rockets books to the bestseller list, but I want to remember that that’s all in the service of writing. The reason I want those things is so that I can keep writing. If I can keep writing, I’ve already won and everything else is just gravy.
The Man in the Banana Trees is out now via University of Iowa Press.
For more info, check out margueritesheffer.com and thirdlanternlit.org.
Top photo: The author, at a reading at Blue Cypress Books on November 6.
photo by Tammie Quintana
