What We Inherit with Shannon Sanders

[00:00:00] What's good, family? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams, the host of Black & Published, and the author of the novel, The Seven Daughters of Dupree. This historical fiction novel is about the secrets kept between mothers and daughters over the course of seven generations, and is told backwards in time from 1995 to 1860. The Seven Daughters of Dupree was published January 27th, 2026, and is available everywhere books are sold.

[00:00:28] So if you can, please consider getting a copy of The Seven Daughters of Dupree today. This is the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. Black women have this legacy of having to be very careful with the weight of things that we understand and fear, but that makes us in some ways thrive in certain spaces where maybe our men are not able to as easily.

[00:00:56] What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams, and this is Black & Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. We have a return guest to the podcast today. Shannon Sanders is back with her debut novel, The Great Wherever. It's a generational family saga about a 30-something woman living in D.C. who suddenly learns she has a stake in a century-old family farm.

[00:01:23] In this story of inheritance, Shannon was also able to explore the different lives lived through the generations, especially for women, and what they legally can or cannot do with their bodies. For this sort of like huge paradigm shift to happen while I was writing this book, I didn't know that there was going to be quite so much of the like mother-daughter lineage of talking about motherhood and intentionality behind motherhood until that happened in real life. And all of a sudden I was like, oh there's something else that I really want to say here as well.

[00:01:53] Shannon leaves no topic untouched from reproductive rights and the ubiquity of the queer community throughout the annals of time to the precarious cruelty that happens when Black people are in white spaces. In our conversation, she discusses the dangers of leaving behind both your place and your people. Plus, why she doesn't believe fiction can truly correct the historical record.

[00:02:16] And in writing, lawyering, wifing and mothering nonstop for the last decade, what Shannon's doing now to rest. That and more is next when Black & Published continues. Shannon, last time we talked it was for Company, which was your linked short story collection.

[00:02:41] And your main character in The Great Wherever Aubrey is featured in one of my favorite stories in Company, like the Hot and Tot Venus or something like that. And she was outside acting bad at a public party with her parents and her sister. But that collection followed like her mother's side of the family, the Collins family. Yes. So now you're back with The Great Wherever, which follows her father's side of the family. Mm hmm. The Lambs.

[00:03:10] Where did these people come from? I had that idea for the novel way before I started to write short stories. And I didn't know when I was going to get around to writing a novel. I wrote the short stories over the period from like 2015 through 2021 and then continued working on them after I sold the book.

[00:03:30] But around 2021, I started to need to try to get something going with a novel just because of, you know, how when you take a short story collection out into the marketplace, there are going to be publishers who want to know what else you're working on and that kind of stuff. And so I began to try to piece together what I thought was going to be a novel at that time.

[00:03:51] And I always knew I was going to be writing about a family farm and about kind of some of the tensions and conflicts that come up across generations trying to hold on to this piece of land. And at some point, I knew that I also wanted there to be a protagonist who was a young person who didn't necessarily know kind of the impact that she could have or sort of what the freight of this family legacy was. And at some point, it seems really obvious that that could be Aubrey because that's exactly the kind of character that she is.

[00:04:20] So she ended up being sort of the perfect protagonist for the story. So Aubrey was always going to be the girl and you wanted to do a family and a farm. In your acknowledgments, you talk about how it's kind of inspired by your grandparents and great grandparents. What's the backstory there? Yeah, my grandmother, her father purchased from his brother a piece of farmland in Tennessee. So it's very loosely based on kind of my understanding of that history.

[00:04:49] Now, the Lamb family, they're not the same as my family. There's a lot of differences and none of the events in the book happened in our family either. So it's not like a Cane River kind of, you know, it's not like a fictionalization of family history. But the one thing that is very much the same is that my great grandfather and his wife, they both were educators. They very much cared about giving their kids an opportunity to move forward. They raised these six kids.

[00:05:18] They left the farm to my grandmother and her siblings, I think, in the 70s. And then the six of them ended up sort of settling in different places, having different lifestyles, having, you know, families of different sizes. One of my grandmother's siblings had six children. Another one had just one child. And so they had this piece of family farmland that over the years we have had to continually decide what's going to happen with it next. Who's going to manage it? Are we even going to keep it? Who's going to live there, if anybody?

[00:05:49] And so I was always really interested in kind of how all those questions have to be confronted all the time as the family like expands and expands. Okay. And so is that also where the ghost came from? The four ghosts? I'm just a ghost story lover. I really love ghost stories. And I grew up on stories that had to do with haunted houses. I loved all those like children's ghost books by Mary Downing Hahn and some of the Catherine Rice books.

[00:06:15] And I wanted to write a ghost story, but I didn't necessarily know that this was going to be the ghost story until I started to write. The book opens with this breakup scene where Aubrey is, she thinks she's about to go get engaged, but she actually ends up getting dumped. That's not really a spoiler because it happens in like the first few pages. And as I was writing that scene, I was just sort of writing it in like a classic third person omniscient. And then I realized that I was like wanting to give this voice to the narrator who was witnessing it.

[00:06:44] And I kind of started to imagine this character of like a relative who had a lot of interest in Aubrey and a lot of patience for her in some ways, but also a lot of critique. Like, what is this child doing? And so I developed the narrator character who we don't really find out who it is for a while in the book, but that was sort of where that came from. I just found that it was so much more dynamic to tell that breakup story through somebody else's perspective.

[00:07:12] And then I found that the whole story made more sense through that perspective. You don't tell us who the narrator is until toward the very end of the book, but you can figure it out like halfway. Like, I think it's this character. Just keep going back to the family tree in the front. Yeah. All right. So that's where that particular ghost came from. But they are four. Why tether them to the land?

[00:07:36] I think that the land itself, it definitely represents something for this family that is, it's both tangible and it's also intangible because this is a place where they originated, right? And it's a place that they have all in some senses strayed from. As I was growing up, we always had reunions in Tennessee where the family farm was. And I would otherwise never see those cousins. I didn't have like really a reason to be in touch with them. It was the 90s and whatever, so we didn't have a way of keeping in touch.

[00:08:05] But this land just repeatedly brought us back. And then my great grandparents, some of the things that they did, like the businesses that they owned, were, you know, kind of reflected in like the historical society documents that we would see when we were in this little town. And I really do feel like there is something about place that becomes very, it's almost holy in a family.

[00:08:26] And the memories of people who are gone, I think are louder in certain places because, you know, how when you have a reason to walk through a place that you haven't been in a while, like if you're walking around on your college campus, memories will come back to you that otherwise you never would have thought of again. And those things are real and they become something that impact the way that you move through the world going forward. But you have to almost be reminded of them for them to have that impact. And so, I don't know.

[00:08:55] I mean, like I said, I'm a lover of ghost stories and there tends to be some sort of a network of rules about like where ghosts can be and what they can do and how much influence they can have over the living world. And I just kind of decided I was going to make up the rules for this book. Yes, because at first they are tethered specifically to the land. The very first ghost to return to the land upon their death can only walk the farm.

[00:09:20] And then as another, a second arrives, they begin to become tethered to the caretakers of the land. So the descendants who are given the land as an inheritance through bequeathment and wills and such. Yeah. What was the difference in making that rule that allowed you more freedom as a writer on the page? So the way that I think about it is when the land is committed to somebody else.

[00:09:47] So, for example, and you said you're going to put a spoiler alert at the top. When the patriarch of the family decides that he's going to leave the land to this particular heir, his youngest son, that's when the ghosts who are already there begin to have access to that youngest son. And therefore, what he experiences, they can too. And they can have access to these other parts, you know. So he gets to go out into the community, go to the Negro high school, down the street. They get to be in those places too.

[00:10:14] And then as that family imprint kind of expands and expands, so does their awareness of the world around them. So by the time you're a few generations in, they're global ghosts, kind of. So they can be any place that anyone in that widening circle of descendants has been. And your question was, what freedom did that give me on the page as a writer? My editor is Emily Griffin at Holt.

[00:10:37] And she had really good advice, which was to avoid over-explanation because the less you explain to the reader about how a mechanism works, the less opportunity they have to say, well, that doesn't make sense, you know. But to me, I was always very clear about kind of like what the policy was, like who could see the ghosts, who the ghosts could interact with, you know, how the interactions could work in both directions.

[00:11:03] And so that was really helpful, I think, to me as a writer, because if you have too much freedom, then you end up with a blank page and you can't even get started. But as it made sense to me that, you know, we were going to have sort of like this expansion of their territory, it was really exciting to sort of go back and recreate. There's one ghost who became a ghost right before emancipation. And so her life ended and she was still an enslaved person.

[00:11:28] But she barely missed getting to see this entire new world that her children were going to get to live in. And so it was very exciting. And it was also helpful to have sort of the framework of knowing how life in that Tennessee town would have changed and what she would get to experience of it. Did the particular characters that you made, ghosts who are tethered to the land and then again to the heirs, was it because of how horrific their deaths were? Because, oh my God!

[00:11:56] Okay, so the idea is that they're there because they were initially supposed to be landowners and they never got a chance to. So each of them has at some point been promised in some way or someone has written their name down on a piece of paper and said, this is going to go to this person. And then they ended up dying before they were able to actualize it. And so it just so happens that for all four of them, because that would have to happen when someone was very young,

[00:12:22] because otherwise it's likely that they would eventually have gotten to inhabit and also inherit the land. But they all just happened to have things happen to them that were really tragic. Let's talk more about Aubrey and the state the reader finds her in at the beginning of the novel. Poor baby. So she goes through this breakup with this white man. I think that's important. Yes. She's working all these odd jobs. She's in her 30s.

[00:12:52] Her best odd job is as not quite a paralegal, like senior technical assistant. Some bullshit. Because she won't go get the certification and then she won't go to law school. Like she just won't do right. And you mentioned that the ghost who is attached to Aubrey has patience for her even as they are critical. Is that where you want us to encounter her as well? Like to have patience and grace for her? Because sometimes you're like, nah, girl. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:21] I mean, I think that that's real, right? Like this is a part of the challenge for me of this was thinking about the idea of this millennial. And I mean that in like the real, the true sense of what a millennial is. So somebody born between 81 and 94. And this person who is, she's educated. She has plenty of privilege on her side in many ways. Yes, she's black. Yes, she's a woman. She lives in DC or the DC area. And she's surrounded by sort of like this intelligentsia. But she is also the younger daughter.

[00:13:51] She has a very talented sister. She is motherless. Her mother passed away when she was really young. So even younger than the sister would have been when that same thing happened. And so she didn't get to experience quite as much of the teaching or the mothering that her sister got. Her father kind of looks down on her a little bit because he thinks that she just doesn't have it together. She's a fuck up. She is a fuck up. She's the family fuck up. But then there's also the fact that, of course, you know, like you and I know this.

[00:14:19] Previous generations often don't see like economic reality for millennials, for example, for people of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They don't understand that when somebody is working three full-time jobs, they should be able to make rent. And it's not necessarily their fault that they can't. And so I liked playing kind of with that idea because, of course, yes, she's very immature. She's not really living up to her potential in many ways. But also she does have a full-time job and she's living with these four roommates.

[00:14:47] And that's like a common story for people, you know, in D.C. And so I wanted to kind of like make it so that there were a lot of things that were definitely her doing. But also some of it is circumstance. And, of course, she's 32 and her great-grandfather at the same age was buying this like vast expanse of land. And she can afford, you know, a room in a communal house. And so those are the stakes for Aubrey where she's dead-end jobs, bad breakup, heartbroken, fuck-up of the family.

[00:15:17] Her father just died and she finds out after she finally checks her damn emails that she has the inheritance of the farm. And then all of a sudden we're on this family trip quest to find our roots and learn about our inheritance. And she makes this great journey to Western Tennessee. That's called something in literature. What is it called? Is it a hero's quest? Yes. Okay.

[00:15:46] There's a term for this. Like I'm circling around it. Yes, the hero's journey. Was that always the frame that you wanted to contextualize what her life was going to be or become with the context of the stakes that you set up for her from the very beginning? You know how where you start is like never where you, like it just doesn't end up going where you thought it was going to go. I knew the beginning. I wrote the beginning, you know, years earlier.

[00:16:14] I knew how I wanted it to end because I knew like sort of the arc I wanted it to take. I knew what like sort of the punchline of the book was going to be. I knew how it was going to wrap up with respect to Aubrey and her relationship with the family. I had no idea that it was going to take us like actually to Tennessee. I thought that the whole book would be set in present day and mostly take place in D.C. I did kind of have like question marks like what is going to happen in D.C. to make this into a journey.

[00:16:41] But it didn't occur to me that I was going to have to both move her in space and also time to be able to make the story make sense. But then as she was getting ready to travel back to Tennessee, when I wrote the scene where she's kind of like at the airport and I was like, OK, she's going to have to go back to Tennessee. Let me think about what's going to happen there. And then the next thing that I ended up writing was like, here's a history of Tennessee starting with the antebellum era.

[00:17:06] And all of a sudden I was like, oh, gosh, I'm going to have to go back and tell what her grandfather was doing to make it make sense why she's like this. And so then from there it became more obvious. And then the story really flowed once I started to get into the movement from the first generation that's really profiled, which is like Thomas, the guy who purchases the land to his four children. Like at the point when I was writing a scene that was sort of these are his four children.

[00:17:35] Two of them were always beefing with each other. Then there's this girl. Then there's this extra. All of a sudden it became a lot clearer what was going to have to happen in the book. Did you go to Tennessee and do research at your family land or any of that? I've been to Tennessee a number of times for family trips. So I had been to a town that is very much like the one in the book, which is called Bolivar, Tennessee, which is where my grandmother's from. And then I did get to go to Tennessee in May of this year, but I did not get to go during the period of writing the novel itself.

[00:18:02] So this pulled from like nostalgia and just what you know from all of your family trips back for reunions and stuff. And research. Yeah, I did a lot of research about there's a community called Orange Mound outside of Memphis, Tennessee, which had been previously the Dedrick plantation. This very large, prosperous plantation that became like a freed person's community. And so I did a lot of research about that and I kind of blended it with memories of Bolivar. And also I talked to my grandmother a lot. She's 93 years old.

[00:18:31] She's extremely happy to talk about, you know, her past and stuff. She loves to share memories and she gave me plenty of really good little textural details to use. Like what did they eat for dinner and where did they go to the market and what were her parents like? So a combination of those things. Oh, I love that. Has she read the book? She did. I didn't know if she was going to. And I told her that there's going to be a large print edition, which I was going to give her. But she read it in like two days because she wanted to come to one of my book events in the area.

[00:18:59] So she read it and she really liked it, she said. When you were deciding to send Aubrey back and have her introduced to these strangers, but who are her family members that she met in the haze of her father's funeral and repast. And they're all trying to feel one another out. So, and Hayes says something like, you know, we're tenants in a common. We are not. There is no voting here. Is that from your own experience in law and with your own family and land and property?

[00:19:27] Is that normal or common so that you have this awkwardness amongst kin and it's very, you know, a wander in a strange land, even though it's supposed to be home. And as you mentioned earlier, like that, that, that place should be holy. Yeah, I mean, that is one way that it can definitely happen because of course you can change the way that the property is passed down so that people have to work collaboratively to make decisions.

[00:19:51] Or so that if one person passes away, you have right of survivorship and whoever is left gets just their share gets a little bit bigger, you know. But in a case like this where the land is so big, what happens with this family is kind of exactly the scenario that we see that tragically ends up messing up so many family homesteads. Because of course you have one person who disagrees about how to handle something. And so maybe they agree to be bought out, but maybe they just sell their piece to somebody else.

[00:20:19] Or maybe they just sort of like walk away and abandon it sort of the way that Aubrey does at the beginning of the book and just not ever pick up their responsibility. And the communication channel is not there and people can't decide what to do. And so because there isn't that collaborativeness, it just sort of festers. And I hear lots of stories because I've heard a lot of stories from people just like coming up to me and talking to me about this happening in their families. I think that that is like a, unfortunately, a really common end scenario.

[00:20:47] And then ultimately they're just like, let's just sell it. We just can't figure this out. Or maybe one person takes an interest and then they sort of, depending on how honest they are or what the relationships are, they might either fairly or unfairly decide to buy everybody else out. But one thing that happens as a result of a family getting bigger, like this one does, and holding onto it for so long, like in my family, it's a century farm. So it's been held by members of my family for a hundred years. The same thing is true with this farm in this book.

[00:21:16] But at that point, you've got people across many generations. The youngest ones are each other's fourth cousins in some cases. And they might not have ever even spent time in the same room. They may not live on the same continent as this piece of land. And so it's just really, it's both the, that's like the beauty of having a piece of farmland or having a property at all, is that it can bind these people who have such like disparate lives. But then it's also the major challenge to that.

[00:21:45] And mentioning that Aubrey is the family fucker. He comes from the line of who I think the real villain is in the book. Mm-hmm. You can't tell me otherwise that Joa, a.k.a. Polk, is not a villain. Mm-hmm. Go ahead, read something from The Great Wherever so we can talk about this man. Okay. All right. The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders is a generational saga centering Aubrey Lamb, the millennial daughter of two deceased parents who learned she's inherited a stake in a century-old family farm.

[00:22:15] This inheritance takes her to Tennessee to learn about the land, lineage, and legacy from the other tenants in this unique comic, while the reader learns about the ghosts who are tethered to both the farm and its descendant caretakers. Here's Shannon. I think I'm just going to read the very beginning. So this is the part that I hope nobody skips. Okay, but the afterlife? It's nothing like it looks in the movies. It's a lot more forgiving than that, for which I guess I'm thankful.

[00:22:44] I died early on a Saturday morning wearing an old pair of H&M tights under an oversized Hot Shell Ray t-shirt I had jury-ricked into a mini-dress. I was wearing the dress ironically. I wasn't even a little bit into HCR. My tastes then ran moodier and boozier. Kendrick Lamar, Lana Del Rey. But if I were to get the Hollywood treatment, I'd be stuck in that mini-dress for all eternity. Badly sewn hem and all. Luckily, it doesn't work that way.

[00:23:12] My eternal spirit isn't trapped in the wrong clothes. Not the slashed-up tee I died in, nor the ugly frock my mother picked out for my wake, with its churchy neckline and repulsive peony print. And although I died in an ugly way, I don't look ugly. I look beautiful. More beautiful than I ever felt alive, though I was beautiful then, too. Almost no one ever gets a good look at me now, but if they did, they'd see me in my favorite going-out dress from that year, the one I wore all the time before my old college roommate swiped it from me.

[00:23:43] BCBG, black lycra with a tummy panel and a cutout just at the center of my ribcage. A little diamond of teasing brown skin placed just so. Hints of underboob on either side. Exfoliated, moisturized, hair freshly relaxed. Lips plumped up with this gloss I liked at the time that had a little bit of a chocolatey flavor. One tiny little tube cost $24, a splurge. And if we'd just had a fight, I could sometimes get my boyfriend to buy it for me.

[00:24:12] I was proud of that then, but I've since realized it's nothing special. Mostly the look goes to waste, though. Around here, it's generally the same tired old audience. A few relatives of mine from various generations, who couldn't care less about my overpriced lip gloss. Who, like me, got chopped from the family tree before their branches could flower. Who died on the receiving end of a particular unfulfilled promise. Which, by the way, is the best we can figure as to why we're here.

[00:24:42] At the heart of all of this is a family farm, a share of which was supposed to pass to each of us, but didn't because we all died cruelly and too soon. The farm is the only thing that connects us four, aside from our deep cupid's bows and our insatiable love of gossip. Did you realize? The dead are relentless gossips. Or at least these dead are. We try to be reasonable, but do we judge? Like shit.

[00:25:09] And this place has one great advantage over earthside society. It feeds our nosiness generously. Here, we aren't restricted by geography or the walls of our own memories. Even those of us who in life never boarded a plane, never even left western Tennessee, have nonetheless by now gotten to experience in-season swordfish Meunier at the Baltimore Ocean Air by way of a living cousin of ours.

[00:25:32] We've traveled many streets, seen all sorts of concerts, eavesdropped on a thousand juicy arguments. We get to be where our people are, perched on their shoulders, figuratively speaking. Some of our people, at least. We can enjoy, almost limitlessly, our hosts' living bodies, their rich troves of memory, every dank private emotion they've ever felt, every buttery, lemony bite of fish they've ever tasted and bothered to remember.

[00:26:01] And for all intents and purposes, we live here now, on this farm we never got to inherit. Without even trying, we see what happens here, overhear all sorts of conversations, from banal to explosive, better than the best reality TV. But lesser, of course, than the thrill of both seeing and being seen, which I took for granted when it was available to me. Now it's only every so often that I catch direct eye contact,

[00:26:29] or an appraising once-over from a living relative. And it's only then that I have complicated feelings about my Lycra dress, because who wants to be known as some kind of ho-bag haunt? Then again, I died young, my 28th birthday a couple months away. From an under-boob standpoint, it could have been worse. Thank you. It's like that right there, like the ho-bag haunt. And it's just like, wait, what?

[00:26:56] But I can see the comedy coming from the relative who died at 27 and became a member of the 27 Club. Thank you. All right. She's badass, too. She's serious. She does not think that's funny at all. She is so serious. Which makes it even more hilarious, because it's so, like, it's just little drops and drips of her personality. And she's very serious, which is why she keeps going. And it's just like, what?

[00:27:26] Yeah. Which is why, also, I think that she has patience for Aubrey, because she's like, in another life, I could have been you. Although she had a little bit more together than Aubrey does. But at her end, she was unraveling. Yeah. Although briefly, I do feel like she was close to getting her mind right. She was going to pull it back together.

[00:27:51] But at the time of her death, she was mid-unravel. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And what I just realized is that in addition to it being about the farm, with the exception of Peter, it's about mothering and children where these lives are unraveling. Mm-hmm. Thinking about Xena and Fern and then the narrator there. Yeah. And I know you're a mom. Yep.

[00:28:19] How did, and there's lots of talk between the women about mothering and what you should and should not wait for a man to do, which is nothing. Yes. That's the long and short of it. But how did your own experience with your children, and then even in your marriage, if you want to share, influence the relationships and the richness of the relationships in the novel? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:47] I mean, I, so like I said, my grandmother is living, she's 93, and she lives nearby. So does my mom. So does my mother's sister at this point. And so, of course, I had, you know, a lineage of relationships with these women. And I have three sons. And so my oldest son is eight, and then my younger kids are five. They're twins. And I really started to work on the book in earnest after the twins were sleeping through the night. So most of the book was written when I already had three children.

[00:29:16] But as I was writing the book, so the Dobbs decision came out in 2022, which overturned Roe versus Wade. And I already had my three kids. But of course, I grew up in a different era. We all did. In which it never would have occurred to me that in my lifetime, that decision would come down. And, you know, it was so many of the choices that my friends who are women have made over time

[00:29:44] about, you know, school and career and partners and where they wanted to live and what they wanted to do with their time, all were made within the understanding that we would get to choose motherhood and how we wanted to encounter it, you know. And for this sort of like huge paradigm shift to happen while I was writing this book, I didn't know that there was going to be quite so much of the like mother-daughter lineage

[00:30:08] of talking about motherhood and intentionality behind motherhood until that happened in real life. And I all of a sudden I was like, oh, there's something else that I really want to say here as well. That everybody needs an Aunt Carrie. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I also, you know, there's the character and no one really asks about her all that much, but Darla, the character of Darla, who's Thomas's wife, and who I think of as being kind of a, she's a little bit of a standout of her generation in some ways,

[00:30:38] because she's pretty empowered. She's obviously very intelligent. I think of her as being potentially neurodivergent. There are some ways in which she thrives when they move to the farm that were very challenging for her when she lived back in Serviceberry, which was a much more communal space where people were expected to sort of like share borders and not have as much privacy, not have as much autonomy over their homes. But she has these children and there's a point where she's like, oh, you know, she's, some things are overwhelming or this is just enough.

[00:31:07] You know, I don't need more competing demands on my time right now because I've got to set up this house. I've got to be the mistress of like now this huge piece of land. And in some cases, like she has to, she kind of has to like tune her children out in some ways to be able to do these other things she needs to do. Don't we all? Well, exactly. Yeah, this is true. Yeah, I'm just talking about her in general at this point. Okay, I was like, hold on. I feel like before you smash me by my edges, like hold on now. I'm just saying just in general. Yeah, I think she's a really interesting character,

[00:31:36] but she also has to like provide some elder care. You know, she's sort of like at a sandwich point in her life. And then later on, she's got this one child who's her only daughter, who she really connects with and says, you know, I have some things I need to tell you that I don't have anyone else to tell these things to. So I'm sort of like generally answering your question of how did my experience of being a mom impact my writing of her in the book? And among many other things, you know, there is the fact that I have a whole bunch of sons

[00:32:04] and I had questions about like, oh, I have so much institutional knowledge about things. Like, what am I going to do with some of this information? And in part, the answer is like, oh, well, I can put it in this book, you know? So that was a little bit of an interesting thing for me. I did enjoy that, you know, as my kids sort of like got older as I was writing, because I had like these infants at the beginning. And then by the time the book finally was in the editing and revision stages, the kids were like running all around. They were in school.

[00:32:32] And, you know, I had a lot more understanding of just like what life is like for parents of more than one child than I did at the beginning, which is to say it's a mess. It's real ghetto. Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, I got to include like some little details that were like when Darla is kind of like alone with the kids, you know, there, there wouldn't be noises that she would hear that she wouldn't even bother investigating because like she's just got all these little boys or whatever. And that came from real life for sure.

[00:33:02] But yeah, there were many things I feel about things going on in my life and in the world at the time that definitely found their way into the book. So let's talk about Darla's children. Yeah. And as you just mentioned, you know, she's very intentional about her children. The first two were the first two. The last two were very much like, OK, we're doing this again when I want to. Yeah. And we got caught up this one last time, but now we're done. And so she has these four children.

[00:33:31] Elijah is the eldest son. Joah, you may have the reference, the heir and the spare. Darlena, the beloved only daughter. And then the baby boy, Peter. There is a rivalry between the eldest sons, Elijah and Joah. And it seems like from birth. And I even think you say something to the effect that Joah is an asshole.

[00:33:59] Like, he's just like, he's like, he's like a dick from like a little kid. Like, oh, you got Elijah the Christmas present that I wanted because you didn't remember. So I'm going to eat all of it and then throw it up and feel no way bad about it. Uh-huh. Yep. And it's not lost on me that Joah, he's always underfoot. He's always striving for attention and love and whatever he's wanting, he's not getting.

[00:34:27] And it's from his line that Aubrey comes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Is there anything that you're trying to say there about what we inherit personalities from our people, having her be his descendant? One of the things that's so interesting to me about siblings is that they grow up in the same house, but no two siblings have the same parents, right? Everyone has the parents that focused their attention on that child at that time.

[00:34:57] And so Elijah got parents who were very adoring and admiring and who thought that he could do anything and who sort of gave him leeway to do everything and didn't like check up on his movements and stuff. And he was also the older one of the two. And of course, you know, Lena and Peter, things were very different for them. But Joah got a version of those parents who were constantly looking at him with this look of like, now what are you doing? Why didn't you find a summer job yet? What is your plan?

[00:35:27] You don't think you should enlist, right? And so on. And I think that that's very much going to inform the way that a person moves through the world and then the values that they take away from their upbringing. Even though the upbringing happened in the exact same house as Elijah's upbringing, the lessons learned from it are going to be so different. And then what is passed to the children is going to be so different.

[00:35:49] And so because ultimately, Joah finds that his answer to that question, how are you going to make a way for yourself if Elijah has already done the best of everything that this community has to offer? The answer that he comes up with is sort of, let me go find myself a different community in that case. And that's sort of what he does. Yes. And he goes to find the white people. Shit! Why is this man trying to make the white people his community?

[00:36:18] Because he sees that as the alternative to being the second best, I think, in his own house. Is he a self-hating Black man? Doesn't it seem like it? It does, because he's giving very Republican vibes to me. Yeah. I mean, if this were written about a person in a different era, the way he would express it would be so different. But yeah, he lives kind of in isolation on this farm.

[00:36:39] And so that's the other thing is, of course, like this decision that Thomas and Darla make, which is they're going to move out of this robust community that they have raised the first two children in. And they're going to move them to this place that's like, oh, we're striking out on our own. It is limitless possibility. Let's see what you all can make of it. It's kind of the same thing as like with Bellamy and Aubrey. They lost their mother very young. Bellamy had enough time to learn some things from her first. And Aubrey really didn't.

[00:37:07] And likewise, Elijah had a chance to become sort of a man of the community and to figure out how to interface with those people. And Joah didn't. And he ended up sort of in this place where he had to figure out something to do to make a way for himself that his brother seemed to do effortlessly. Don't have me feeling sorry for that man. Like, don't have me feeling sorry for Joah. I don't. But I do get that. We mentioned the last two children.

[00:37:36] And Darlene, which is the only girl. And so she's, of course, loved and adored and doted on by both of her parents and her brothers. And then the final child, Peter. And so when they're four children, large age gaps, the last child is loved but doesn't get like a whole lot of attention. Like his attention comes from his sister. His brothers kind of just mess with him and poke at him. Joah specifically pokes at him.

[00:38:05] And again, with the matter of fact, way that you lay things out. Again, spoiler at the top of the episode. We learn that Peter is queer, is gay. Just as we learn that, you know, very early on when Aubrey is going to the farm for the first time and she meets Hayes and Hayes is talking about his husband. It's just very, this is what it is. There's no explanation, no qualification, which I love.

[00:38:30] But the era in which Peter lives, he doesn't know that he's even in the closet that he has to come out of. Right? And in rendering the fullness of his life and talking about how his parents had him in this upstairs loft where he had his own access and came in and out of the house at all hours of the night with whatever guess he felt like it. And they're thinking it's some girl and he's got some other things going on.

[00:39:01] Were you trying to make scene in this family, in the black community, in these rural towns where homophobia is thriving these days, that this is nothing new? Yes. Yeah. And there's even, I think, a line, if it made it into the final cut, where one of the ghosts who is the oldest ghost, she's like, this is nothing new to me either.

[00:39:30] You know, she had seen an entire world on the plantation that she had once lived in. But she just didn't, you know, she maybe didn't expect that of this particular kid. But she didn't have any surprise about it either. But yes, absolutely. I think that it's really important. And because of the way that the book is constructed, of course, we spend so much time in the present, where Aubrey is a very contemporary person. And she actually, when she's first like looking Haze up, she sees that he's in like the Nashville Gay Men's Choir, I think.

[00:39:58] And this doesn't register with her as anything to even worry about. So by the time she meets him, she kind of has like a sense of who he is. And of course, we as 2026 readers, we encounter him the same way. We're just, okay, tell us what are you here to tell us, you know? But of course, then when it's time to go back and explore what life was like in 1954, when Peter is having his comings and goings, there's a completely different set of expectations and rules that we have to deal with. And so much is different.

[00:40:28] It kind of works that way throughout the book, because there are a couple of other queer characters as well who show up in later generations. But you can, I hope, sort of see how the way that the family responds to things that happen in Peter's life begin to shape some of how they respond to that idea in present day. But of course, by, you know, the very present day when we've got Haze and Aubrey interacting, so much of it is water under the bridge at that point. But yeah, it was something I really wanted to do. I have, you know, I have queer cousins.

[00:40:57] I have, of course, many queer loved ones. And I really wanted to make part of the story be that there is no story there, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I guess what I'm gathering is that because of Joah's resentment for Peter, for a number of reasons, because he knew about the inheritance, because he knew that his brother was gay, because he calls him sugar boy. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:41:23] Um, so like, Luke had a plan that he was going to execute and manipulated Joah into allowing him to carry out whatever his plan was going to be. But that action and Peter's murder has a ripple effect on the entire family. Like, it changes all of them. Like, Darlena stops speaking up. Mm-hmm. And that's like, Elijah can't sit too long.

[00:41:53] And Joah just completely blocks it out of his mind that he can't even touch it. And then even on the other side with the ghost, Peter can't even touch it. Mm-hmm. Like, when the main narrator's pressing him and asking him about his death, he's like, do you really want me to go back?

[00:42:12] It changes Elijah, too, because Elijah, of course, views it in the straightforward way, which is he thinks that this happened because his younger brother, who was gay, was in some way inappropriate or whatever with this white man. Mm-hmm. And that he probably deserved this, even though it was an overreaction. So Elijah's taking it at face value and then goes on to raise children with that sense that a man has to act this certain way and we can't be put in that position again.

[00:42:42] You know, it has to be – so Samson, for example, who's Elijah's son, is very strict about masculinity and policing behavior among his relatives, even as we get into 2026. Elijah has another child later who is also gay and that one has to sort of hide himself from his father until after he's gone. And so that, you know, sort of like poisons Elijah's line in that way as well.

[00:43:10] And when you say that, like, Lena ends up never speaking up for herself, I think that it changes her into a person who's very cautious with what she ever says. And in fact, in her case, it almost – she ends up going on to have, like, a very successful life and career in many ways. Like, it almost puts her in, like, this little straitjacket that makes her very successful, which to me that feels also very real.

[00:43:33] Because I feel as though a lot of Black women have this legacy of having to be very careful with the weight of things that we understand and fear. But that makes us, in some ways, thrive in certain spaces where maybe our men are not able to as easily. Do you think fiction is able to correct some of the historical record, even though it's made up? Correct is such a strong word.

[00:44:01] But I do think – because, of course, no, we can never correct the historical record. Because, of course, like, you know, lives lost, property boundaries redrawn. Everything has already happened the way that it has. I do think that it can – for those who are willing to let it do this – I do think that it can recontextualize so much and bring people to think about things like the question that you just raised about Nolan Wells.

[00:44:27] You know, because, of course, somebody reading this might be like, well, did you just take this from that case, for example, or whatever? Like, is this a response somehow to, like, the lynching of Emmett Till or something like that? And, of course, the answer to both of those questions is no, it's not. This is a classic story that has repeated itself so many times and with so many differences in the texture and the subject matter. So, yeah, I hope that fiction continues to do that.

[00:44:54] And I'm really glad that, as is the case with this book, like, you always see that, like, men don't read fiction. You know how, like, 80% of fiction sales are women behind them. But I do think that, like, that is shifting some. I think we're getting, even if it's just, like, in the book space, like, more Black male book influencers, which I'm really excited about.

[00:45:13] Because I think that so much that has been lost to the historical record can possibly resurface through personal accounts, through verbal, you know, oral histories that end up making their way into published fiction. I mean, I sure hope that that's the case. Me and you both. The reason I use the word correct in terms of the historical record and what fiction can do is because I see your book in the lineage with Dolan Perkins-Valdez's Happy Land,

[00:45:42] as well as Tara Shelton Harris's book Long After We're Gone, which both deal with property rights, adverse possession, heirs property, all of that. And your book does the same. And talks about the legacy of Black people losing land, whether it's completely or it's a fraction through these different legal maneuvers.

[00:46:05] Or now what's happening, especially in terms of gentrification, where, you know, the house is paid off, but you lose it because the family can no longer maintain the property taxes because everything has gone up because of gentrification. And what that means for the economic status of entire communities, but specifically individual families. Do you feel like you're writing in a tradition of that? Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:46:33] I do think that the reason that these things keep surfacing in fiction is because they are really changing prospects for our generations. So, yeah, I hope that that's the case. And then also Honoré Fanon-Jefferson's The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is another what I think of as like a spiritual ancestor to this book. So I hope very much that that's the case. What do you want readers to take from the novel? What I always want readers to take is a story that they felt immersed in.

[00:47:01] I want them to, at some level, enjoy the process of reading it. So that's always going to be my main goal as a storyteller, I think. But then also I want them to think closely about what these four siblings are telling us about potentially the dangers of leaving behind community.

[00:47:21] Because I do think that so much of the catalyst for what happens in this story is the family's move from Serviceberry to this farm where they live as sort of their own governing body. And kind of in what feels like sovereignty, but in many ways they're so vulnerable to some different things that are present on this farm. What I really enjoyed about having this particular narrator who is, she's a contemporary character, much like Aubrey. She's young. She's 27.

[00:47:50] She's very smart. But she's also, you know, many generations removed from, for example, enslavement, from the Jim Crow South, from some of the things that the ghost characters in the book have all had to experience. And so she is able to talk about those things with a sort of emotional distance that I think makes them both a little more accessible, hopefully, to both her and to the reader.

[00:48:19] But also that allows you to see them plainly for what they are. And I think you kind of put, you talked about this a little bit at the beginning of our conversation. You were like, some of the ways that she says things, it's just like, and then this happened and then she just moves on, you know. And that would be the way that a 27-year-old thinking back on her great-great-grandfather's experience living in the same country might conceptualize those things.

[00:48:45] And I think that that makes the read, I hope that it makes it dynamic, but also in some ways a little bit livelier and a little bit more accessible than like a classic like history text. It was a lot of fun. Normally, I would ask, you know, what are you working on next? But for you, because I feel like you've been working, working, working for like the last 5, 10 years on top of having children and a full-time job as an attorney. I want to know, what are you doing to rest?

[00:49:14] Oh, gosh. Oh, my goodness. Are you resting? No. That's the answer. The answer is no. I mean, I kind of am like a I'll sleep when I'm dead person, which I know is not, that's not something that I would recommend anybody take as their personal ethos. I will say that in like this season of promoting this book, I am trying to make sure that I really feel emotionally ready to move on to the next thing, I guess.

[00:49:43] And so that for me is a little bit restful. I'm going to go to some festivals, some literary festivals over the next couple months. And if nothing else, you know, getting a chance to stay in a hotel room and not have to cook for anybody and get to read some other people's books. I mean, yeah, I'll say that too, is that for me, part of resting is getting to return to reading as a reader as opposed to as a writer for a little while.

[00:50:08] And I have a lot of books that I'm really excited to get to that I have not been able to for the last few months. So, yeah. Big thank you to Shannon Sanders for being here today on Black and Published. You can follow Shannon on Instagram and threads at ShannonSandersWrites. And make sure you check out The Great Wherever. It's out now from Henry Holt & Co. You can get a copy of the novel from Mahogany Books and get 10% off your first purchase using code BLACKPUB at checkout.

[00:50:35] That's B-L-K-P-U-B. That's our show for the week. If you like this episode and want more Black and Published, head to our Instagram or YouTube page. It's at Black and Published and that's B-L-K and Published. There, you can watch a bonus clip from my interview with Shannon about the potential tragedies that can abound when Black people enter white spaces in both life and in her novel.

[00:51:06] Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll holla at y'all next week when our guest will be Shonda McManus, author of Brother Epistles, A Sister's Memoir. I think it's really critical for anyone dealing with grief or looking at it because if you're worried about your basic needs, if you're worried about your economic and psychological safety and support so you don't have that, you can't adequately grieve.

[00:51:33] Like you almost think is grieving a privilege, right? That some people have and some people don't. That's next week on Black and Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace. What's going on, family? This is Derek Young. And Ramonda Young.

[00:51:59] Owners of both Mahogany Books and the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. We really want to thank each and every one of you for listening to this episode. And if you enjoyed what you just heard, drop us a review and rate us on whatever platform you download podcasts on. We truly appreciate each and every one of you for supporting us and making us your go-to for Black books. And we look forward to connecting with you all sometime in the future. Thank you again, fam. And always remember, Black Books Matter.