Transformation, Revelation, and Form: An Interview with Marguerite Sheffer

“The uncanny prompts us to see even ourselves as unfamiliar—a stranger, someone we don’t recognize,” writes Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer in an opinion piece for Education Week. The article is an unexpected spark, a literary craft talk, in an otherwise policy and practice-driven professional journal related to careers in public K-12 education.

I first met Sheffer in 2023, when we collaborated on an AWP panel for teachers who centered the classroom in their literary work. We are both former high school English teachers, and Sheffer is a graduate of the Randolph College low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. Sheffer lives in New Orleans and teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction.

In Education Week, Sheffer credits her experience as a high school English teacher as one variable in her preparation for writing speculative fiction, of delving into the uncanny. That preparation, the stories that came “flooding out through [her] fingers” became The Man in the Banana Trees, Sheffer’s debut short story collection. The Man in the Banana Trees, selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, was published in 2024.

Wide-ranging in its scope and embodying curiosity in its exploration of short forms, The Man in the Banana Trees is full of thrilling, speculative turns and features a fantastical cast of characters, including a Muppet-like ninth grader, an antebellum haint, one of the iconic medieval Unicorn Tapestries, a teacher stalked by phantom tigers, and a middle schooler with a desire to free the skater encased in a snow globe. The collection was named a 2024 Debutiful Best Debut Book of the Year and an Electric Literature “Most Exciting Debut Collection.” In 2025, The Man in the Banana Trees was a finalist for the PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize.

This interview was conducted over Zoom and email during the summer of 2025.

Mahru Elahi (ME): What made a low-residency MFA the most compelling choice to you?

Marguerite Sheffer (MS): I went back to writing in my mid-thirties. I had a house and a mortgage, and was family planning. I had a full-time job that was going to fund this thing. So, it was the only model that would have worked for me at all. I also was coming to realize that, as much as I was excited to immerse myself in the world of writing, I did not want it to be my full-day. I wanted to find a way for writing to join the life I was building, not to abandon that life and spend two years only thinking about writing, and then jump off a cliff and have to reenter the real world. I wanted writing to be harmonious with my life in New Orleans. So I only applied to one program which was the Randolph College low-residency MFA. I was surprised and grateful to get in.

ME: What made Randolph your one and only?

MS: The faculty are stellar. Maurice Carlos Ruffin, who is a writer-about-town in New Orleans, posted about how special a place Randolph was. It had a focus on kindness. I knew that any kind of competition would have been a real turn-off for me. I was seeking a kind, generous place committed to non-competition. That, I think, is something that sets Randolph apart. Lastly, I knew I wanted to try speculative fiction, which not all MFA programs cater to. Several writers on the Randolph faculty either write speculative or speculative-adjacent work. They’re explicitly open to that.

ME: Were there other goals that you came into the MFA program with?

MS: “Tiger on My Roof,” which is the last story in the collection (was) started in my first semester. It was guest lecturer Melissa Febos who nudged me to try that story. In our first Zoom COVID residency, she had us write a list of things we were scared to write. Then she said something like, “Okay, now I want you to abandon what you’re working on and write those things instead.” I was so scared to write some of the things on that list. But the topic at the very top of that list became, eventually, over many hundreds of drafts, and many, many deep revisions, “Tiger on My Roof.” It was one of the last stories to be finished for the collection. It was a real kick in the ass. I think I needed permission to not feel ready to write the story and to start it anyway, to have that fear be a natural part of the writing process. I have learned now, after much practice, that it doesn’t get easier. But I have learned to at least recognize that feeling is probably a sign that that’s the thing to actually write.

ME: “Tiger on My Roof” confronts the experience of a white teacher grappling with racial privilege and grief. In past interviews, you’ve mentioned that you are able to make sense of your teaching experience through storytelling.

MS: I grapple with complicity. When should I have done something different than what I did? The nice thing about fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is, it gives me enough narrative distance where I can wade into things like complicity, or some of my own cowardice or, you know, things that didn’t go the way I wanted them to. I could write a story where something had a worse outcome than it actually did in real life. I can be a lot braver through fiction. I think of the children’s book The Monster At The End Of This Book (Little Golden Books, 1971). The monster at the end of the story is sometimes me. So I think that speculative fiction can be a really good tool to deal with complexity.

I grapple with complicity. When should I have done something different than what I did? The nice thing about fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is, it gives me enough narrative distance where I can wade into things like complicity, or some of my own cowardice or, you know, things that didn’t go the way I wanted them to. I could write a story where something had a worse outcome than it actually did in real life. I can be a lot braver through fiction.

ME: Is there a particular story in The Man in the Banana Trees that surprised you?

MS: Oh, gosh! I would give you different answers on different days. I’m really proud of (all of) them, because I stuck with them through the bad early drafts. I know how far they’ve come. I think “En plein air” today. You asked which stories change in workshops. The main character in “En plein air” is Marie, a white antebellum ghost haunting an artist’s colony. Early drafts expressed less empathy for her, and that’s understandable because she’s a racist, jealous piece of work. She has a lot of blind spots, and that’s kind of the point of the story. I think the more years I spent working on “En plein air” wasn’t to absolve her, or forgive her for her sins, but really just letting her breathe more into the story and grow a little bit more as a person over the course of the story. She has a different ending now than she did in the initial drafts of the story where she exploded in jealousy. She still disappears at the end of this draft, but it’s more of a decision she makes. Which is a little grace. It took me a long time to get there. It turned into a story very different from the initial premise.

ME: What advice do you have for folks to explore and build their own capacity around the writing practice and process?

MS: I can only really say what worked for me, and hope it’s helpful. Rather than working on one piece and trying to perfect it, I spent my early semesters writing a lot of stories. I was “at bat” a lot. The goal I set with my mentors in early semesters was: I want to finish as many complete drafts of as many pieces as I can. They had endings, so we could talk about if the endings were working or not. I just produced. I’m very proud of the huge volume of work from those early semesters. I then spent years revising those stories. They weren’t partial ideas, and I wasn’t being precious about language, or trying to perfect one before moving on to the next. I was trying to figure out how to finish a story. I needed to do that not once, but many times. I needed to learn and plot into the fullness of a piece, especially for short fiction.

ME: You have moved away from short fiction and are working on a novel now. How is that process going?

MS: It’s so hard! I’m on draft seven of my novel in progress, Egret. I’m quite public about how much I’m having to unlearn in order to write it. I’m a writer of flash fiction. A lot of the stories in The Man in the Banana Tree are short. Some are micros. I definitely have a bias towards the short. I think it lets me be stranger. But in a novel, you choose where to linger or insert the asides, build the richness or the threads that are not neatly tied in a bow. I was just thinking the other day about how I loved C. S. Lewis novels growing up. There’s so many weird, memorable scenes where the children are just sitting around drinking spiced wine with a magic animal. It’s not pushing the plot forward with swiftness. It’s this decadent lingering. How to linger well without losing momentum is the current challenge.

ME: There’s a lot of research going into Egret. Is there joy in that process? How is that showing up?

MS: The novel is entirely sparked by research. It’s inspired by a nonfiction book called The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis that just had a few paragraphs about the egret extinction at the turn of the century. Egrets were almost hunted to extinction, because they were hunted for their feathers. Those few paragraphs sparked the whole novel. The Gulf briefly covers three historical characters, and all touched this story, but never crossed paths in real life. It’s completely a fictional work: what if these three people had crossed paths? And—what if there was magic involved? I love reading newspaper articles and firsthand accounts, and I think one of the best things about research is: I don’t have to use everything I find; I can bend to the truth. It’s very clearly a work of fiction, and all the names of places and people are made up. But sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. I think if I was to sit here and imagine 1899, it would be really boring in comparison to the real 1899, which was a wild and progressive time. One of the three characters is based on a woman, a female reporter named Catherine Cole. Her papers are based at Tulane University, so I was able to walk out of my office, walk to the next building, sign them out, and hold them. It was very, very cool. She’s a character. The fact that it’s set locally means that I’ve been able to visit historical sites. The streetcar I ride to work every day is the setting for a scene in the novel. It’s experiential, hands-on research. And there’s an island that plays a big role in the book. So I’ve been there a few times to check it out. Many days my allotted “writing time” just means time spent researching and thinking.

ME: The Man In the Banana Trees was published in November 2024. It’s been a year, so I can imagine that there’s been a lot that you’ve learned from this process of releasing and promoting a book. I’m curious if there are any reflections you’re holding.

MS: Yeah, so many reflections. First, I’m really glad I didn’t self-reject, because I did not think I was a serious candidate for this award. I’m very used to rejection, so I just kind of sent it out and forgot about it. If there’s something you’re interested in, that you think feels like a right fit, even if you don’t feel ready, I would say: submit! Also, I think it is a wonderful experience having a book out, but at the same time it is very easy for the task of publicizing to eat up all that precious writing time if you let it. I’ve had to get really careful about protecting my writing time, because some days it feels like there’s another threat to it. Sometimes ambition competes with actual art. I think another great thing I’ve learned is that people do love short stories. It might be a smaller crowd than with novels, but there are people who go crazy for short stories. There are readers out there. Sometimes the numbers don’t seem that way, but when people reach out to you: it’s a strong, small, mighty group of people; it reaffirmed my love for the short story. I’ve had several writer friends have trouble querying truly excellent short story collections. I’m happy that The Man in the Banana Trees found a home at a small press, the University of Iowa Press, and is being treated really lovingly by people who also love short story collections.

ME: As someone who is obsessed with the concept of hinges (both as story form and as metaphor) I was struck by the repeated use of the term within your collection. Given the themes your stories explore, particularly the relationship between the human and non-human, the child and the adult, the weight of history and the present—what does the hinge (as a symbol, structure, form, etc.) mean to you?

MS: I love that you called it out. Have you read Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison?

ME: Yes, I have.

MS: I love that book, and I particularly love the part where she talks about authors, whether consciously or unconsciously, putting their structural metaphors in the book like a map of how to read the shape of the text. I knew I loved hinges, but I had never thought of it this clearly before until you pointed it out. I didn’t realize that they appeared in these stories, and I do think about them as a metaphor for short stories in particular, because I’m a very premise-driven writer. I know some people start with the character. But for me a hinge-moment is kind of the heart of a short story, and then sometimes the characters come later. It’s often the very first thing that comes to me: this moment of transformation, or near transformation. Something where the after can’t be the same as the before. One of the most tragic things in stories is when a character gets so close to the hinge, and can’t quite do it, but the reader can see it. It makes me think of the volta (in verse). I know there’s many different kinds of short stories, but the kinds of stories I love are the hinge-y ones. The poet Angel Nafis, who is faculty at Randolph, said, “a poem without a volta; that’s not a poem.” I feel the same, though, about short stories and fiction. If it doesn’t have that hinge or that turn, it doesn’t land for me. The hinge can take many different forms and can look a whole lot of different ways. But for me, that’s the special sauce.

Can I say one more quick thing you made me think about?

ME: Yes!

MS: I spend a lot of time on Reddit. Too much time, probably. There’s this question in the discourse: can people ever change? And as a fiction writer, my answer is: people are always changing, that’s the juice behind fiction. It might be difficult. It might be traumatic; it might be so hard; it might be invisible to others, but what fiction can really do is show us that change is happening, or at least possible. It’s such a special thing. That’s what I spend my life thinking about and trying to zoom in on in stories.

ME: I love that you called the hinge in prose a companion to the volta in verse.

MS: And it can be a small one, right? It can be someone seeing a memory differently than they did before. It can be someone accepting something that already happened. It can be a revelation that is almost attained. It doesn’t have to be a very visible change.

ME: What are you reading currently? Who is exciting you within the literary community?

MS: Yeah, so many things. I just finished a great book called Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili. He is a Georgian writer, via England. I really loved this book. It has a really interesting plot with a compelling voice. A friend recommended it. There are fairy tales and speculative vibes mixed in. I may reread Euphoria, which is a book I love by Lily King. I was recently at Readercon, a conference for imaginative fiction, and one of the authors I was on a panel with was Stephanie Feldman, whose book Saturnalia is my next read.