SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Shannon Sanders' new novel is a story told through ghosts, multiple generations of a Black family who inhabit a spread of land in the fictional Lanyer County, Tennessee. And on an early page in the novel, a narrator ghost tells us...
SHANNON SANDERS: (Reading) 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. 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.
SIMON: "The Great Wherever" is the new novel from Shannon Sanders. She's author of the highly praised short story collection "Company," and she joins us in our studios in Washington, D.C. Thanks so much for being with us.
SANDERS: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SIMON: Your ghosts are engaging and interesting, and they see a lot. But did you hesitate to have them steer the narrative?
SANDERS: Well, I love a ghost story, and I believe that a lot of readers do, too, and are hungry for ghost stories in one form or another. They are not scary ghosts. I like to say that right up front. And I think that the idea of spirits and of hauntings, especially of sort of ancestral hauntings, are really exciting to a lot of people. So I leaned into it.
SIMON: I mean, unless your experience is otherwise, we don't really know how they talk, ghosts.
SANDERS: Well, right. Yes. That makes them fun to write. And it also - it means there's no one to tell me I'm doing it wrong.
SIMON: There is a human at the center of your story, Aubrey Lamb. She's 32, works multiple low-paying jobs in Washington, D.C. And we meet her - essentially, we're there for the breakup with her boyfriend of four years. Then she learns she's a farmer...
SANDERS: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Following the death of her father. How's that happen?
SANDERS: She has come to inherit his share of a piece of family property. He had two daughters. He left kind of the family suburban house to one. And then to the other, he left this faraway piece of farmland that they really never got a chance to interact with as children when their father was living. But this comes into her life as sort of a surprise.
SIMON: And does she envy the inheritance that her older sister, Bellamy, gets?
SANDERS: I would say that almost anyone would envy the house they can see as compared with the farmland that they've never been to and have never given a thought to.
SIMON: Aubrey is an urban character.
SANDERS: Yes. Very much - city girl.
SIMON: How do the country cousins see her?
SANDERS: Oh, they can tell. They can smell from a mile away that she's a city girl and that she's got some learning to do.
SIMON: Tell us about Aubrey's great-grandfather, Thomas Lamb.
SANDERS: He was a very entrepreneurial spirit in the town of Servisbury (ph), Tennessee, which was a community of Black people in the '30s. And he grew up in sort of a tight-knit community of people who all looked out for one another. But he always had sort of an eye toward expanding his imprint. And so he was interested in purchasing a piece of farmland because he thought it would be a nice place for his kids to stretch out and maybe to start to experience something of their own.
SIMON: And tell us about the ghosts. I'm especially interested in Zena.
SANDERS: Yeah. And so this novel is narrated by a particular ghost, but she is sort of surrounded by these three other ghosts, representing four very different eras. There is Zena, who was enslaved, and she became a ghost shortly before emancipation and so tragically just barely missed getting to experience life as a free person. That was, of course, a challenging ghost to write, one that I had a lot of trepidation about approaching just because of the seriousness of that idea.
The narrator of the novel is a younger, more contemporary ghost and is sort of more my age-mate and has some things in common with me and my peers. That made it both easier and a little less intimidating to approach some of the subject matter of the historical ghosts.
SIMON: What's the pull of this land over your characters - this family farm in Tennessee once owned by whites?
SANDERS: Yeah. Well, land, of course, represents, in so many places in literature, opportunity and freedom. I think that here, it also represents community and the coming together of this family. My extended family co-owns a piece of farmland in Tennessee, and that is where we would gather every couple of years when I was a child. And that might be the only time I saw those cousins or my grandmother's siblings and their relatives. And it was just always a place that we could come back to and sort of connect and where it was very evident what our shared values were even as different parts of our lives were extremely divergent.
SIMON: Speaking of family stories, you write something that I found particularly telling. You write, there's no singular, truest version of any family story. Every version comes with misremembering and projections and savory flourishes.
SANDERS: I think that is one of the things that is most exciting to me as a novelist. With a novella that has this many characters in it, there is the opportunity to see family stories from so many different sides. No one's version is any less accurate in terms of memory or in terms of the way that they experienced it. But as the reader, we get to see sort of a picture come together that nothing is really as any one character tells it.
SIMON: Against, at least, my expectation, the property becomes potentially valuable, profitable for Aubrey. Does that put her at odds with the family of ghosts?
SANDERS: Oh, well, for sure. I think that this is where our ghosts would definitely have a hard time understanding our choices in many ways because economic reality changes so much. And Aubrey's economic reality is so different from the realities that her ancestors have experienced or expected for her. And so what she might see as valuable about the land is not going to match necessarily what they see as valuable.
SIMON: Aubrey is seeing a price tag.
SANDERS: Oh, for sure. Yes, a very enticing price tag because she, like so many people of her generation, is trying to piece together her rent with these little jobs. So why not be excited about the idea of a big windfall?
SIMON: I was struck by another phrase you have in the acknowledgments. Writing a novel in the quiet night hours is a fumble through the dark with a short candle.
SANDERS: Yeah (laughter).
SIMON: Oh, my.
SANDERS: Personally, I have a day job. I have small children, and I did most of the writing of this book, truly and literally, in the quiet of night after everyone else was asleep on, you know, sometimes little energy, sometimes with a lot of competing demands. There are so many reasons not to finish writing a novel because there is so much going on at all times. And so I really applaud anyone who gets to the end.
SIMON: I don't think I've asked a novelist this question before. Do you still hear from the ghosts?
SANDERS: Oh.
SIMON: I don't think I've asked anybody that question...
SANDERS: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Before, come to think of it.
SANDERS: Well, yeah. That's a unique question. I felt a real sense of finality when I finished the end of this book, and I certainly still think about them a lot. It's been really exciting to get to talk to readers who are meeting them. And I think I feel that they are safely situated on that farm at this point.
SIMON: A totally personal question - do you hear your family ghosts?
SANDERS: In ways, for sure. My grandmother was one of six siblings. She had two very influential, very determined parents. They were both educators. They both really cared a lot about education. And even though our family is very large and spread out, and everyone is doing very different things, I feel as though we are all hearing from them every day. That's the closest I have been to being haunted in the best way.
SIMON: Shannon Sanders - her new novel, "The Great Wherever." Thank you so much for being with us.
SANDERS: Thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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