Marguerite Sheffer: On Rejection, Experimentation, the Power of Short Stories, and Her Debut Collection ‘The Man in the Banana Trees’
I first met Marguerite in December 2020 over Zoom. We were part of a cohort of nine writers who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, decided to pursue our MFAs through the low residency program at Randolph College. It would be another six months before we would meet in person, and another year after that before we, along with our friend and fellow student Tierney Oberhammer, would start meeting as a writing group.
But even when our only communication was from afar, it quickly became apparent that Maggie and I would get along. She was warm, thoughtful, and engaging, and when I encountered her work for the first time, reading an early version of “Rickey” in a workshop, I found that I would describe her work the same way. I thought about that story for months afterward and, although it’s hard to find two of her stories that are exactly alike, “Rickey” to me feels like a quintessentially Maggie story. She fully commits to its premise—a Muppet student who is struggling at school)—transforming what could feel ridiculous into something familiar, poignant, and heartbreaking.
When I heard that her collection The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press, 2024) was selected as the winner of the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award, I was thrilled for Maggie; I’ve watched her labor over these stories with care and precision. It’s a delight to see these stories out in the world, and to hear her speak about writing them, and what this book means to her.
Corinne Cordasco-Pak: To start, I wanted to ask you my favorite question to ask writers, especially writers of short stories. Where does an idea start for you, and then what do you do next?
Marguerite Sheffer: That’s such a good question. I don’t have a very consistent answer, but oftentimes it’s voice that I’m able to pin down first, and that gets me excited—figuring out what a character thinks or how they sound or just a voice in a blank white space—and then after that comes the setting and the situation and the premise. I also write a lot in response to prompts. That’s how “How We Became Forest Creatures” came up. The prompt was from Apex and it was “footsteps in the forest.” A lot of my stories start with obsessions. I was obsessed with Vivian Meyer and Hilda [af Klint] and outsider artists for a long time before I figured out how to turn that obsession into a story.
CCP: So many of the pieces in the collection interact with pieces of art or music, such as “In the Style of Miriam Ackerman,” which deals with outsider art, or “Mouse Number Six,” which is set during a production of The Nutcracker. How do you approach writing about a piece of art?
MS: Well, as a concrete example, the story “En plein air” came when I was visiting Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which became the Melrose Artist’s Retreat in the early 1900s, and looking at the work of Black painter Clementine Hunter. In brief, the story of her life is that she worked at the artist’s retreat as a cook, and began painting with discarded paint from visiting artists. Now, she’s by far the most famous artist to come out of the retreat. I remember thinking about what it would be like to be a ghost of one of the white artist residents, haunting that place, and I thought, “They would explode out of jealousy.” That became the premise of that story.
With “Rickey,” I remember thinking, “We think of Muppets as the epitome of curiosity, learning, and joy—all the things we say school is for—but if a Muppet landed in a school, it would throw everything into chaos because schools aren’t actually built around curiosity and joy. The story became “What if the thing we said we wanted came true?”
CCP: That commitment to exploration shows in the book, which feels like a celebration of short stories. There are flash pieces, there are longer stories, there are traditional stories, and more exploratory ones. What attracts you to writing short stories?
MS: I’m interested in experimentation and, frankly, it’s much easier to experiment in the short form because it’s less risky. You can take bigger swings or do very strange things with form that would be exhausting over a whole novel. You can get away with a lot. I like to think of the idea of really big swings in really small spaces. It feels like every choice has an outsized impact and you can see what happens. It’s not as delicate of a balance as a novel —which I’m learning now, as I’m struggling through writing a novel. In a longer work, you change one thing and then fifty more things across three hundred pages have to change, but a short story is like a little box. You can tightly control what happens within it.
CCP: I love that image of a short story as a little box for experimentation! Are there any short stories by others that have blown your mind and made you excited to sit down to write? Are there any stories that the ones in your collection are in direct conversation with?
MS: There are so many! It’s hard to think of specific stories, but I’ll call out some collections: Tender by Sofia Samatar, which also has a lot of stories about art and artists, and if it makes sense to make art in a dying, violent world. One that I know we both love is The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado, especially that first story, “Thoughts and Prayers.” She’s able to hit emotions very hard and unflinchingly in short story form in a way that I’m always trying to do. Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is another collection that is both literary and speculative. He writes about violence in such an admirable way, where the impacts are real and felt and serious, but the violence itself is stupid and absurd and worthless. Kij Johnson’s At The Mouth of the River of Bees was one that Anjali [Sachdeva] had me read in my first semester [of my MFA]. It’s full of experiments. It showed the range of what a collection could do.
My story “The Midden” started as a riff on an Etgar Keret story called “Car Concentrate,” which is a father/son story in which the father is crushed into a car. I enjoyed that story but wanted to try to turn some of that imagery on its head, writing the most yonic story I could, about a woman and a daughter, with kind of an opposite turn by the end.
CCP: Short stories can be so exciting but for some reason, people who aren’t writers don’t seem to get as excited about them. But for writers, they’re such an exciting form. And sometimes a collection will break through, like A Visit From the Goon Squad, which is a novel-in-story, or Her Body And Other Parties, which is on every girl’s bookshelf, even though it’s very strange and experimental.
MS: I think it’s a marketing problem. I think people would love them. I think that the “common knowledge” that people don’t want short stories is just wrong. People loved Black Mirror, people loved Her Body And Other Parties. People loved Love, Death + Robots on Netflix. People love podcasts. We’ve just got to figure out how to get them in front of people more. It feels like there’s a disconnect between the literary magazine world and the commercial reader world, but I sure don’t have the solution. I just think people would like short stories.
CCP: I’m so glad that you brought up lit mags. One thing I love about writing alongside you is that you’re transparent about your wins, but also your losses. I remember when we were first writing together, you were on a quest to get a hundred rejections in a year. How did you get to the point where you felt comfortable with rejection? Has that changed now that you have a book coming out, especially as a contest winner?
MS: That’s exactly right. I beat that goal and logged more than a hundred rejections that year, and every year since. I am very happy with the book coming out, but what’s funny is that the stories in the collection are still getting rejected all the time [from lit mags], which is extra fuel for my strong belief that publishing is a numbers game. If publishing a story in a journal is about finding the right match, you may need a lot of rejection to find the readers you’re looking for. Tracking rejections helps me feel more in control of a process that I have very little control over, so I track submissions very, very diligently. “Tiger on My Roof” had more than fifty, and that’s one of the stories that I’m most proud of, and it landed in Epiphany, a wonderful journal.
Honestly, because I was initially trying to get rejected, I aimed higher than I would have otherwise and got a lot of rejections from those places—but I also got some personal rejections that were surprising, and my first acceptances! I learned that I am horrible about predicting where a story will gain traction.
I have a folder on my email called “Read When Discouraged,” where if I ever get an acceptance or a nice rejection or anything nice at all, I just save it in that folder. So if I’m feeling down, I’ll just sit there and read the nice things people have said and try to remember that I am not an idiot.
CCP: That makes a lot of sense. The whole process—waiting two hundred days for a form rejection—can feel lonely, but it’s an experience that a lot of us share. Now that we’ve talked about rejection, though, let’s talk about publishing your debut. How is your writing life (or life in general) different now that The Man In The Banana Trees will be out in the world?
MS: I would say remarkably little has changed on a day-to-day basis. I still write with my amazing writing group whenever I can, and that’s still the highlight. The work doesn’t become any easier. I’m still trudging through the same novel I was trudging through at the time I learned I won. And rejections are still coming in for the same stories. Most everything is the same—except that the book exists. I’m looking forward to getting it out into the world, but writing is still the most precious, fun part of the process.
I am learning that publishing a book is not the end of the story, but the beginning of the publicization part. It’s a whole new set of skills. When I first found out that some people hire independent publicists, I couldn’t imagine doing it. But then as I was diving more and more into my research, I realized it was a very good idea for my situation, so I did hire a publicist. I have a full-time job, a young child, and very little time to self-publicize. I feel really lucky that I’m able to budget for that.
I’m constantly trying to negotiate: should I be doing more publicization stuff or should I be working on writing fiction? And as much as I enjoy talking about the book, the thing I enjoy most is people reading it. I’m not as smart as [the book is]: the best, and most interesting version of me is in the book.
CCP: To that note, you’ve put a lot into this collection. The stories don’t shy away from topics that are complicated or painful—race, violence, pregnancy loss. I’m thinking specifically of the title story and also of “Tiger on My Roof.” How do you approach writing these topics?
MS: Our first semester [at Randolph], Melissa Febos was one of the visiting authors. During her talk, she said that she always tells writers to write a list of the things that scare them too much to write. She phrased it better, something like “What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” And then she said, “Go write those things.” So I did that, and several of the stories in the collection came out of that initial list. I didn’t know that would be a real groundbreaking moment, and at the time I didn’t know how to write about them, but it was very transformative to write the list. I wasn’t envisioning a collection at all. I was not trying to write a book.
I think one of my dirtier secrets is that, especially with the harder subject matter, I enjoy writing about it; it almost feels like a guilty pleasure. It feels like exercising some control when I feel powerless: turning it into a puzzle, trying to make it entertaining, trying to make it into a story. All of a sudden I’m in control. Sometimes I would cry while I was writing. Sometimes I would cry while I was editing. Sometimes I would cry while I was reading these stories in public. But I was also consistently having fun, which is a weird thing to say. While there’s nothing fun about living through some of these things, there was something quite fun about crafting those same experiences into something brand new.
One thing that I want to emphasize is how some of my early drafts of these stories were probably straight-up offensive. When you’re truly grappling with some of your darkest thoughts and impulses, it can come across as very shitty in the early drafts, but I think anything has to be allowed in the drafting process. When something is published, I have to fully stand behind it, and I have to be okay with it being out in the world. Until I figured out how to strike that balance, with so many of these stories, I would think “This is not working. I am not smart enough to write this.” I had to persist through drafts being quite bad for quite a long period.
CCP: That leads right to my next question: how do you use experimentation to figure out how to make a story work? Are there any stories in the collection that ended up somewhere totally different from what you thought?
MS: The exciting thing about experimentation is that by definition, I don’t know if they will work until the very end. I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull it off. I have lots of failed starts. Sometimes the experiments that are cool in my head are not serving the story, and it is helpful to have a writing group to tell me that. Jennifer Egan, who I admire so much, has talked about a similar thing, even having a list of experimental forms she wants to try.
“The Observer’s Cage” started as a failure. There was a story called “Moonstruck” that I tried for years to write. It was also about astronomers and it had some similar plot points. I was so stuck on it that I got a big astronomy textbook from the library, and I would just sit and read it. That previous story was set hundreds of years earlier, but one day I opened to the page about pulsars and was entranced by what I read and ended up writing this entirely new story from the bones of the one that never worked. They’re so different that they’re barely connected except in my brain. But that one failed story became “The Observe’'s Cage,” though at the beginning it felt like I was cheating on my previous story.
CCP: Having seen many of these stories in workshop, it was exciting to see you start to think of them as a collection and identify the ways they could become something larger. One thing that’s been huge for me is sharing both writing and motherhood with you—your daughter is seven months older than my son—and it’s been exciting to watch how motherhood manifests in your work. Can you tell me about balancing your life between writing, parenting, and your day job, especially now that you have this added element of a book release?
MS: That’s a great question! I have amazing childcare, partly through my job, which helps cover some of the costs. We have family nearby who help with babysitting and I co-parent with my husband. So I’m in a very lucky spot… and it’s still challenging. I’ve always been a morning writer, from 5:00 am to 8:00 am, before work. Now, if I’m lucky, I can get fifteen minutes in before Reggie wakes up. I’ve had to adjust to working slower and following my impulses a little bit less. If I feel the writing bug, I can’t drop everything and write for three days straight. At the same time, the inspiration is still there, the creative tank is very full. It’s a creatively fulfilling thing, to parent.
Right now, Reggie is aware of the writing group though, which is cool. She recognizes you guys from Zoom. We tell her, “Mom wrote that book!” and she doesn’t get it yet. But I am excited for that to someday click. It’s fun to watch her grow to love her picture books.
I feel some guilt—that I try not to feel—about arranging childcare for writing time. It often feels selfish to just be like, “I’m going to ask someone else to watch my child while I sit there thinking my thoughts or just reading.” At first, that was really, really challenging, but that is one nice thing about having the book published: it gives me more clarity. In hindsight, all that time spent writing was worth it. But it was worth it before the book was accepted. The “Aha!” is that you don’t need a book deal for your writing life to be real or worthwhile. If I had succumbed to those doubts, the book never would’ve existed.
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Marguerite Sheffer’s debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press),won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories appear in The Cincinnati Review, BOMB, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Cosmic Background, among other magazines. Her story “Tiger on My Roof” was a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize. You can find her online @mlensheffer and at www.margueritesheffer.com.
