Marguerite Sheffer is the author of The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press, 2024) which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and BOMB, among other magazines. She lives and teaches in New Orleans.
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Emilie Menzel: In reading your new book, The Man in the Banana Trees, I was struck by the range of cadences that appear across the collection and how carefully you balanced the tone and the ordering of those tones over the course of the book. The book navigates many serious topics—grief, isolation, loss, disconnect—and manages to do so in a way that holds both reverence and humor. For example, in the first story of the book, “Rickey,” one character emotionally unravels while the other unravels quite literally. In the title story, “The Man in the Banana Trees,” there is a tremendous grief for a lost child and at the same time an impish Rumpelstiltskin creature peeking out behind trees. There are also these short short stories that serve almost as humorous interludes, these faux commercials and reports. I would love to hear you talk more about the role of mischief, play, and humor in your book and how you see it intersecting with the dramatic, serious, and surreal elements of the work.
Marguerite Sheffer: Yes! I was writing about some very serious topics, but I constantly felt playful. I’m really glad that did come across. For me, one of the magical things about writing is that even when I’m doing some deep soul searching or rehashing some of the worst moments of my own life—where I’ve been complicit, or grieving, or all these negative emotions—there’s something about turning it into a puzzle or a game by writing about it that does feel really joyful and sly—like I’m getting one over on the world, reclaiming some power and having some fun. This collection has been kind of a wild ride because there’ve been stories which make me weep to read publicly, but also I’ve often been laughing while writing the same stories.
Part of that came from the fact that I was very much learning how to write stories while I was writing this collection. I was not aiming to write a collection at the start. I was just trying to figure out: how does one write a short story? Everything was an experiment, trying to figure out what I liked and what amused me as I went.
One thing that I think about a lot when I hold the finished book in my hands is how much failure was a part of the process of getting it published. I had many failed starts of short stories. All these stories have been rejected, hundreds, together over 500 times, and continue to be rejected. So I just think that’s something I always want to be transparent with, with anyone who’s a writer, is that that stamp of approval never exactly arises. The process of going from rough draft to having this book, which I’m enormously excited about, was just so much failure and rejection along the way, and that might not be evident when you see the very pretty cover.
EM: Exactly. And that cover—it is surreally beautiful. It was quite satisfying to finish the book and then, closing the cover, suddenly recognize the significance of the odd objects displayed across the table.
MS: We had such fun putting that together. I got to work with a friend who’s an amazing photographer, Jamie Chung, who is actually married to one of my writing group members, and she suggested doing this. It was an amazing process, a huge gift.
EM: I like the saying that with each book, you’re learning how to write that book. Your use of the word game is an interesting one. In improv, they talk about the game of the scene and turning around a pattern you’re uncovering. Is there an example in the book that you feel isn’t necessarily playful but is presenting a game?
MS: I love that phrase, “the game of the scene.” “Yellow Ball Python” was definitely a story that has a bit of a game at the center of the premise. It’s the story of a couple’s relationship over time, told through just a running joke they have about a missing python sign in their neighborhood. It was very much a story where I had the premise pretty early on, and then, for years, had to figure out how to win the game. The thing I wanted to achieve, the fun part, was the constraints I gave myself. Pretty early on in my writing process, I’ll think of a constraint or a challenge that I want to meet, and I’ll then struggle to try to figure out how to make it work. Some of the fun and the gamification comes from that.
Another example is “The Unicorn in Captivity.” I figured out the game of that story pretty early, and then again spent years trying to write it well. The idea was these flashes where the main character is actually a tapestry, and we’re seeing it in people’s lives across time: I knew that was what I wanted to do. Could I do it? Not for a very, very long time, and with lots and lots of feedback and iterations, but the challenge was enough to keep me excited. That was the thing on the very edge of my skill set that kept me working on it for as long as it took.
EM: “The Unicorn in Captivity” is one of a few stories you have in the book that make careful use of section markers. When setting up the game or creating the challenge for yourself, does that ever intersect with form?
MS: I do think so. I write a lot of flash fiction as well, and getting things to under 1000 words is, in itself, kind of a game sometimes, because my stories often start out much longer and way more grandiose and then need to be pared down. But it is really fun, trying to figure out what are the absolute essential bones of a story. I will say I also write a lot of failed flash. “Rickey,” the opening story in the collection, is not flash, but started out trying to be.
But your original question was about form. I would say, yes, the title story, “The Man in the Banana Trees” is one where I very consciously was trying out a form in order to kickstart myself and see what happened. I stole that form almost exactly from Carmen Maria Machado, whose book In the Dream House I had been reading just before. She does this fragment thing, with short, numbered titled sections, frequently referring to fairy tales. I was curious: what happens if I try it? So the game was staying married to these fragments and then reordering them after having written them, and doing some similar things to what I loved about Machado’s book.
EM: Mothers and children feature pretty prominently across the collection. How would you describe the boundary, or the complication of a boundary, between adulthood and childhood in your book?
MS: One of my obsessions that I’ve learned from writing is that I’m really interested in stories about adults who say they are protecting or helping or serving younger people, but are actually prioritizing their own convenience and comfort and not really listening to children. I think that that obsession comes from years of classroom teaching where I was certainly complicit in that. Systems incentivize that. Our education systems are certainly not actually built to provide what young people would really need to thrive. I say all that knowing some absolute superhero teachers, and I loved my time in the classroom. But I’ve spent years after leaving the classroom making sense of some of the moral dilemmas, and the shades of gray, and all the compromises that are part of day-to-day classroom teaching where you can see how much you’re falling short constantly. So I wasn’t thinking necessarily about the borders between adulthood and childhood, but I do think a lot about what adults owe children versus what they actually provide in a lot of cases.
EM: A lot about power dynamics there. I’m thinking of how in “Local Specialty,” the narrator is serving these radioactive abnormal lobsters to the vacationers, the power dynamic of a purposeful absence of information.
MS: Yes! And I think the narrator does that because he feels trapped by the gentrification in the tourist industry. I’ve been on both sides of most of these equations. I’ve been the child and the mother and the daughter and the teacher and the student. And the tourist and the local waiter watching prices rise in their small town. As a writer, I don’t have to have a good answer, but I find the questions and the power dynamics to be great drivers of a complex story.
EM: I like that: questions as a mode of writing. The seeing from both sides. So many of the stories are about looking and observing others or another person. There’s the photographer in “In the Style of Miriam Ackerman,” whose portraiture is both claustrophobic and intimate, a bit like Vivian Maier. Or there’s “The Observer’s Cage,” on the surface about this scientific discovery and telescopes, but in fact pivoting on the scientists watching one another. Can you talk about the juxtaposition of the observer and the observed in your writing, and any creative points of influence, Vivian Maier or not?
MS: Vivian Maier was definitely an influence on that story, so you’re right on there. And then “The Observer’s Cage” is also based on, in part, a real astronomer named Jocelyn Bell Burnell who discovered pulsars and did not win a Nobel Prize.
I think people are probably essentially unknowable, and that’s something I’m interested in showing in short stories. Both of those stories’ narrators truly love and admire these prickly, unknowable women who refuse to make themselves more parsable by being simpler people.
EM: I appreciated that: the generous empathy in the work. And since I’ve been presenting a lot of juxtapositions here: you contrast the private life with the public life of creatives and researchers.
MS: That’s something I find very relatable, too. As an artist, I think if someone were to follow me in my day-to-day, it would be incredibly boring. But, within my actual stories, I get to be wild and uncompromising.
EM: In publishing your debut, you’re yourself at the cusp of entering the public realm. How are you feeling about the expected responsibility of writers to be publicly charming and charismatic on top of their craft?
MS: I definitely identify as an introvert in the truest sense, and I am at once so excited for this book to be out there, because I’m very proud of it and it captures a lot of things I wanted to say and provoke and discuss. At the same time, I often struggle to talk about it, because I write when I don’t know what to say. If someone else asked me to summarize the points of the book, I’m like “Well, I did it. It’s right there.” I have spent years formulating the one way I could think to say this thing. I find it very difficult to summarize or explain succinctly, let alone wittily and charmingly.
But I will say I enjoy talking about the writing process, talking about the value of the writing process and the messiness of it, and why and how we do this crazy thing.
EM: You run workshops on design thinking and talk about how “design thinking is inherently collaborative and messy, and that’s how our writing feels at its best, which is very different from the idea of a solitary genius sitting down and writing the great American novel in one draft.” You’ve talked in previous interviews about writing community, that you maintain a daily morning writing practice with your writing group (which I find very impressive as someone also trying to grapple with the full time job). Can you share more about how collaboration and community helped shape The Man in the Banana Trees?
MS: Oh my gosh, yeah. I do have an incredible writing group, which is Tierney Oberhammer and Corinne Cordasco-Pak, both of whom I met in my MFA program at Randolph College. They have read these stories many, many, many times, and when I reread them, I can see their fingerprints and notes all over them. I take bigger swings, knowing that if I really mess it up, if I really fuck it up, they’ll tell me.
EM: I love the idea of collaboration helping encourage curiosity and making you braver. Both a fuller writer and a writer of full characters.
MS: One common thing we’ll tell each other is “that’s really interesting, and it’s not working yet,” as opposed to “you should cut that because it’s not working.” We can point out where the other writer should lean into something sticky and unrealized, rather than shying away.
EM: In mentioning editing, I’m thinking about editing as trimming and curating the fringes of a story. As a poet, I’m very curious about how one approaches the form of a short story, and I want to approach a question about fringe work from a genre decision perspective. Your stories often center themselves around characters who occupy fringe positions in society, and often that positioning is the focus of the story. Sometimes it’s quite literal. In “Forest Creatures,” they’re walking the edge of a territory boundary. “En Plein Air” has a ghost who’s able to interact with the living and dead. Can you talk about fringe work and your use of the short story form, which often relies on crisp editing edges and careful fringes?
MS: That’s very well put. I do think you’re onto something, and I hadn’t really thought about it clearly till now. Short stories have such little real estate, and I’m often trying to depict a moment of transformation or change, or of walking right up to possible transformation, and then being too scared and walking back. To do that in the short story form, it’s much easier when a character’s already on a tipping point. A lot of the work is figuring out what that tipping point is for the characters, and creating the short story to highlight that, because we all, theoretically, have some tipping points all the time. We’re all marginal in some way, but it’s figuring out for that character: what is their zone of wavering or what’s the change that is possible, and to figure out how to get them on that tipping point very, very quickly. In “Miriam Ackerman,” for instance, the narrator’s decision point is all in one night, right? I think zooming in on characters at boundaries or on tipping points is, yes, something that works very well for short stories in the way I like to write them.
EM: I know that you’re working on a novel now. How did that genre shift happen, and what have you learned about the short story form in not writing one?
MS: You might have to ask me in a few years what I’ve learned. I definitely feel like I don’t know yet, and I’m in the muck of it, right? I do think that I went into writing the novel thinking that it was just a long short story, and I’m quickly learning that that is not the case.
Funnily enough, the novel, Egret, that I’m writing started out as what I thought was going to be a short short story, and then became a long short story, and then became a novella, and then it just kept mushrooming without my actual consent, and it just kept getting longer and longer. And now it’s about 75,000 words.
EM: Do you feel like you have to plan in a different way for the novel than you do for the short story? I’m thinking about the description of writers as either gardeners or architects.
MS: Yeah, I’ve heard the same description. I’m not quite sure I agree with it, because I and most writers I talk to bounce between both modes quite frequently. I definitely start out as a stream-of-consciousness writer, mostly to figure out “what is the juicy bit of what I’m writing about.” But then I very much enjoy restructuring afterwards. A metaphor that’s worked better for me is thinking about clay, and I write a first draft to dredge up the clay from the mud, to generate enough material, and then I can start to sculpt it into a shape. Then, shaping takes quite a long time after that, and then I might even stop and sketch and do a lot of notes, but I’m a lot of the time bouncing back and forth between prose and actual spreadsheets to try to track what’s going on.
I had done a little bit of research for short stories, but this is a historical fiction novel that has been enriched by doing lots of research. I work in a library building, and I can pop downstairs and grab a book when I need to. One of the most fun parts of writing this novel has been to feel really stuck for a long, long time on something, and then to have something come up in the research that is like, “oh, there it is.” It’s like I had a time machine, and I went back in time, and I planted the answer. It’s been thrilling to have this other voice that’s not me, kind of influencing the work. That’s been really fun. That’s this fun X factor of “I could never have written that. I’m gonna pull it from the archives.”
EM: Are you talking about researching for factual information?
MS: The novel is very heavily fictionalized, but based on three real people, two of whom were very big writers, so they left a lot of material in their voice. One of those people is Catherine Cole, whose papers are housed at Tulane, where I work, so I can sneak up there and touch the letters that she wrote and see her clippings from her time as a journalist, and that has been an incredible experience in writing the character. Theodora is not her, but at the same time would never be as rich without this influence. Even though they are definitely not the same person at all, there’s a richness that’s coming from somewhere outside my own brain.
EM: And you have a couple historical figures like this in The Man in the Banana Trees—in “Miriam Ackerman” and “The Observer’s Cage.” Tell me more about your interest in narrative and historical figures.
MS: One thing that’s interesting, too, is that all three of those figures you named in the book—in Egret, it’s Theodora, in the collection it’s Miriam Ackerman and Lizzie—they’re all based on women who had these passionate scientific or artistic lives that did not fit neatly into their day-to-day lives. I’m fascinated by outsider artists, outsider scientists, these people who have these big lifeworks that did not bring them accolades during their lifetimes.
Emilie Menzel is the author of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024), winner of the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize and named a Debutiful Best Poetry Book of 2024. Her prose-poem hybridities feature in such journals as the Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, and The Offing. She lives in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.