Linking Grief and Joy: An Interview with Marguerite Sheffer on “The Man in the Banana Trees” https://ift.tt/EqkL49D
I came across Marguerite Sheffer’s short fiction at the 36th Annual Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee. Immediately, hearing her read a micro-story titled “The Wedding Table,” I knew I had to pick up her debut collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, at the Parnassus tent. I won’t spoil the story, but I will tell you it involves, along with the titular object, a variety of dipping sauces, a cleaver, “coagulants and painkillers,” a wrist, and more. Let your imagination run wild with that one.
Prepare for your imagination to run wild as you encounter the many worlds and characters Sheffer gives us in her book. There is a talking puppet, an escaped yellow ball python, snow globes, virtual tigers, and much more.
Horror and the bizarre are common interests for the author, but the stories here are much bigger than any constraints these descriptors might create. The Man in the Banana Trees is a haunting and meticulously crafted collection. Yes, it’s magical. Yes, it’s weird. Mostly, though, it’s just brilliant.
Marguerite Sheffer teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction at Tulane University and is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a local writing collective, and the Nautilus and Wildcat Writing Groups. She lives in New Orleans.
It was a pleasure to be able to chat with Marguerite about her debut batch of stories.
It’s good to talk to you, Marguerite. As I was beginning The Man in the Banana Trees, one of the early features I immediately noticed and appreciated was how there is such a consistent variety in story length. There is lots of flash, and it’s balanced nicely with more traditional-length stories. Do you approach these stories differently on a craft level? Or, as you are writing, is a story a story — with the same kinds of rules and desired results?
I tend towards the short: I try to pare most stories down quite a bit, trying to uncover the shortest tenable version that still works. I’m really interested in this idea of a “Minimum Viable Story” — what are the absolutely essential parts of a story without which it wouldn’t function? At the Southern Festival of Books, I had a talk with Helen Phillips, and she talked about this paring down as “crystallization” — I love that. In terms of craft, I’ll often write longer, two or three times the length I am really aiming for, and then cut back drastically during the revision process. Even the longer stories have been pared back from even longer versions of themselves!
Grief is one of the big themes in your collection. It’s announced pretty early, too, and then circled back to at the ending. In “Rickey,” which is the opening story. You give us this human-like puppet who is beginning high school. He’s a fun, outgoing kind of student. He’s wreaking havoc, but he also has this kind of tenderness that is buried down somewhere in his stuffing. That kind of thing makes everyone love him. Anyhow, a counselor is called to assist because of his uproarious, mischievous behavior. I’m not going to reveal the ending here, but it presents grief pretty heavily.
“Tiger on My Roof” ends the collection, and it’s about a teacher coming to terms with the death of one of his students. There are VR tigers that show up as a kind of memorial for the student, and these tigers serve as a symbolic connector of those suffering from this loss. Grief is very real in this story.
Will you talk a bit about how you approach grief in your writing?
It seems obvious in retrospect, but I wasn’t thinking about these stories as being linked by grief when I first wrote them. They were written as standalones, and each is so different. I was writing about aliens and art and tigers and ghosts, right? When an early reviewer of The Man in the Banana Trees called it a collection about grief, it felt a little like one of those dreams where you show up to school with no pants on. Whoops! I hadn’t meant to share all that so openly! But of course, now, looking back, the grief thread is obvious and not something I regret at all, even though it wasn’t a conscious goal.
At the time of writing, I wasn’t trying to tackle the big idea of “grief” but more so trying to capture some experiences I had as honestly and vibrantly as possible. Fictionalizing them let me abandon my own ego for a bit and just be fascinated by those times, like looking at a spider through a microscope. Sad times can be intriguing and grotesque and otherworldly and surprising, and even a little bit beautiful through a lens like that. Even if the bite is also very real and painful.
These stories have another connection, too, that extends in the book – one focusing on teachers and students. Your dedication even speaks of these two roles: “For all the students and teachers I have had the honor of working with.” How has being a teacher and a student shaped your writing?
Pretty much all of my life has been spent as either a student or teacher or both simultaneously. Even if the interactions are brief, the teacher-student relationship is such a powerful one. You’re letting someone into your life in a big way. There’s so much trust to put into another person: giving them your time, submitting to their influence, and basically asking them to help you change. Many of the stories in The Man in the Banana Trees are about the power that teachers have and the ways in which they can grapple with or fail to grapple with that immense responsibility.
I don’t want anyone to think the collection is all doom and gloom and heavy kind of stuff, based on the stories I’ve mentioned, because it’s not. There is a ton of humor in these pages. Was the humor intentionally added? Or was it something that comes naturally to you in development?
I love to hear that you found humor in the stories! Seriously. It’s very much the latter: the humor came through the development of the stories themselves, not an intentional seasoning.
I think that observation and curiosity are what bring humor into the stories. I don’t think about trying to add jokes or humor, but I do think about trying to portray people and situations very accurately and with heart. I would posit that daily life is full of absurdity and joy and irony and incongruity, and to exclude those things would be unrealistic.
You mentioned the thread of grief earlier. I believe that the humor in the collection is not despite the grief but linked deeply to it. Grief is hilarious, in my experience, so much that I almost feel shame. All your defenses are down. So much feeling just hits you without any filter. I can recall in particularly dark times finding it hilarious that I still had to eat and shit and brush my teeth and walk my dog and trip on the sidewalk: those things don’t stop for grief, their absurdity is only amplified. And the reverse can also be true. Humor in stories can disarm the reader and make them susceptible to the big feelings I’m aiming for.
I’m interested in technology in fiction, how humans intersect with it, and how we reckon with its continued evolution. Your collection has several moments of humans and technology meeting. “At the Moment of Condensation” is about an agency collecting any and all moisture with robot umbrellas. I’ve mentioned “Tiger on My Roof” and its VR tigers already. There’s also “In the Style of Miriam Ackerman,” which follows a guy going to his dead aunt’s AI-enhanced photography exhibit.
When you are writing about technology, does inspiration usually come to you after you’ve heard of similar kinds of developments? Or are most of your tech-leaning stories created purely from what you imagine technology might become?
I’m a lifelong science fiction and fantasy nerd. Those are the genres that introduced stories to me through movies, novels, and TV shows. So, writing about near-future technology and asking “what if?” feels resonant for me. I do read up on tech and science pretty regularly and informally: for instance, the blog kottke.org highlights stories that I always find fascinating. Most of the tech I write about is my own imagination pushing something I’ve heard about just one or two degrees further. I’ve never heard about tech doing exactly what it does in “Tiger on My Roof,” but I think it is probably possible right now. I find myself imagining tech into adjacent uses for twisted purposes. I don’t do too much research as I go. This means that sometimes I think I made something up, and then learn later that it is not far-fetched at all. “At the Moment of Condensation,” for example, is a dark flash piece about a government that restricts citizens from collecting rainwater. Israel really does do this in the West Bank, but I did not learn that until after the story was already published and out in the world.
I think often of how where we live shapes the stories we write. So, for you, how does New Orleans come through in The Man in the Banana Trees?
Several of the stories in The Man in the Banana Trees are set in New Orleans, though it is never named. I think the most inspiring element of living in New Orleans, as I have for the last eight years, is that making art and being creative are seen as being part of being alive, not something just professional or accomplished “Artists” do. No degree or qualifications are necessary. It seems that everyone I meet has something: if it’s not writing, it’s cooking or painting or music or costuming or dance choreography for Mardi Gras krewes. Creativity is divorced from gatekeeping and prestige, more so than in other places I have lived. People make art just because they love it. Sometimes, I lose that, and living here reminds me.
I think this book would be a very different one (and really, would likely not exist!) had I not moved to New Orleans. I’m lucky to be part of a strong, interconnected web of writers who cheer each other on and encourage each other to keep writing, and that has been so essential.
And also, to come full circle, grief and joy are very openly linked in New Orleans: that’s something living here has taught me.
Thank you for talking with me, Marguerite! And congratulations on The Man in the Banana Trees.
FICTION The Man in the Banana Trees
By Marguerite Sheffer
University of Iowa Press
Published November 05, 2024
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