In 'The Great Wherever' and 'Country People,' city dwellers try out rural life

Shannon Sanders' novel "The Great Wherever" explores the intricate ways family legacy and inherited identity shape Black families over generations. Told through the voices of ghosts spanning different historical eras, the novel considers how memory, land, and evolving values influence family bonds.

Ancestral Influence Shapes Family Through Ghosts and Memory

Sanders uses ghost narrators to give voice to the lives and perspectives of multiple generations. One ghost, Zina, represents an ancestor who was enslaved and died just before emancipation—a presence that anchors the story in the pain and missed possibilities of freedom. The principal ghost narrator is a contemporary spirit, close in age and outlook to the author herself, allowing Sanders to blend personal generational perspective with historical resonance.

The human center of the novel, Aubrey Lamb, unexpectedly inherits Tennessee farmland upon her father's death. This land links her directly to her ancestry and the collective history of the family, despite her urban upbringing and distant relationship with the property. Sanders portrays the land not only as a symbol of opportunity and freedom but also as a perennial meeting point for family connection.

The Lamb family's stories are shown through shifting remembrance and personal bias. Sanders notes that family tales are shaped as much by misremembering and emotional projection as by factual accuracy. With a narrative that covers many characters and viewpoints, the novel demonstrates how the real story emerges from these overlapping, subjective recollections rather than any singular, definitive account.

Economic Realities vs. Ancestral Values and Survival Needs

Aubrey’s view of the inherited farmland is shaped by her precarious economic circumstances as she juggles multiple low-wage jobs in the city. For Aubrey, the land primarily represents a potential windfall—a means to financial security in a difficult present. This stands in stark contrast to the ancestral ghosts, for whom the land embodies freedom, family obligation, and the hard-won fruits of survival.

This generational divide on the land's value reflects how economic realities and opportunities shift over time. Where ancestors once saw land as liberation and a family lifeline, Aubrey sees a price tag and relief from modern financial strain. The ghosts’ inability ...

The role of imagination and storytelling in building meaning and navigating belief is central in Daniel Mason’s fiction, as well as in the writing philosophies discussed by Mason and Shannon Sanders.

Varied Perspectives Show how Characters Build Meaning Through Backstories and Folklore

Miles Shalevsky-Pitrossian, the protagonist in Mason’s "Country People," weaves folktale stories every night for his children. Rather than completing his dissertation on Russian folklore, he indulges his passion for storytelling by recounting elaborate tales—some rooted in actual folklore, others of his own invention. A recurring story involves a mythological shapeshifter, the Humbaba, which becomes a shorthand in the family for the delight and mild trouble of unchecked imagination. The tales Miles shares start influencing the worldview of his children, especially his son, who suspects anyone might be the deceiving Humbaba, blurring lines between playful possibility and genuine suspicion.

Mason builds a vivid imaginative environment within the fictional town of Greensbury, introducing readers to local legends, notably the tale of the Great Slave Fail sleigh factory catastrophe. This invented legend tells of a factory in Greensbury that produced sleds for children across New England, only to have a catastrophic failure one winter where sleigh rivets failed and the machinery all broke down. This backstory, though fabricated within the novel, becomes a foundational part of local folklore, echoing how places and people shape meaning through stories. These legends are set alongside equally powerful beliefs within the local community, such as the conviction among some Vermonters that a portal to a hollow earth exists in the Green Mountains. Mason uses these contrasting but competing narratives to illustrate how characters derive meaning from their environment by constructing, inheriting, and contesting stories.

Storytelling: Creative Escape or Delusion

For Miles, the act of storytelling is a means of creative escape, a way to indulge his passion for tales rather than writing his academic dissertation. Instead of focusing on analyzing Russian folklore, he channels his energy into entertaining and enchanting his children with these stories. Mason reflects on the fine line between productive imaginative play and the risk of drifting into ungrounded belief systems. Through Miles’ tendency to let stories get “a little bit out of hand,” Mason explores the borderland where creative imagination can slip into delusion or false conviction, sometimes even affecting children’s perspectives and fears.

He draws a distinction between the benign indulgence in collective stories that bond a family or community, and the potentially more dangerous crossing over int ...

Daniel Mason’s exploration of Vermont in his work highlights the persistent gap between what people imagine and what they actually encounter, as well as the ways individuals grapple with disappointment and seek belonging, even in unlikely places.

Urban Views on Rural Life Differ From Country Realities

Shalevsky-Pitrossian Family Moves to Vermont With Romantic Pastoral Fantasies, Hoping to Encounter Peasants Like In Russian Folklore, Only to Discover Different Reality

The Shalevsky-Pitrossian family arrives in Vermont driven by romantic, pastoral fantasies, expecting to find a landscape and community reminiscent of Russian folklore. Miles, the patriarch, dreams of writing a dissertation about peasants inspired by these tales, believing he’ll find real-life peasants in Vermont. His wife, Kate, supports the move, also hoping for a simpler, storybook rural life. However, Mason makes clear that the reality is quite different. The humor and central irony of the story arise from these city dwellers enthusiastically preparing to study "the natives," only to find that actual rural life does not correspond to their idealized vision.

Daniel Mason Explored Vermont as Both It Exists and as Americans Imagine It, Emphasizing the Gap Between Preconception and Reality

Mason spent considerable time in the region, researching not just Vermont’s actual landscape and lifestyle, but also the place it occupies in the American imagination as "pastoral" and "bucolic." While Vermont is truly beautiful, many outsiders arrive with ingrained preconceptions about country living. Mason notes that his book is as much about these persistent preconceptions as about the material reality of life in Vermont, and the joke is often on the city people trying—and often failing—to become country people.

Aspirations Often Fail to Materialize as Anticipated

Miles' Fourteen-Year Cycle of Dissertation Topics and Family's Growing Disappointment

Miles is burdened by family expectations as the grandson of the prominent physician Lucius Shalevsky, yet he repeatedly fails to fulfill these ambitions, cycling through dissertation topics without success. This pattern, stretching over fourteen years, becomes a source of quiet but growing disappointment for his family.

Kate, a Scholar of Milton and Blake, Hopes Moving To Vermont and a College Professorship Will Resolve Miles's Lack of Commitment to Intellectual Projects

Kate, Miles’s wife, is a committed scholar of Milton and Blake. She hopes that relocating to Vermont and taking a college professorship will finally provide Miles with the stability and inspiration needed to commit to and finally finish his long-stalled intellectual projects. Despite her passion for literature and her own academic pursuits, she increasingly struggles with frustration as Miles fails to fulfill his potential. Their shared love for literature and idealistic visions feeds both their aspirations and, at times, their disappointments.

Groups Embrace Beliefs Transcending Disappointment

Ho ...

Shared Land and Place Anchor Family to Reunite and Reaffirm Bonds

In the novel, the Great Wherever in Lander County, Tennessee, serves as the family's farmland and acts as a central location that unites the family. Despite leading divergent lives, the land reinforces their shared values. The narrative highlights the land not only as a source of economic opportunity but also as a space for community, as a family anchor, and as a symbolic connection between different places and generations.

Imaginative Communities Offer Belonging For Marginalized Individuals

Daniel Mason describes how the Hollow Earth Society forms an imaginative community welcoming individuals with diverse motivations. Some members join out of loneliness or disillusionment with mainstream religion, while others are drawn to the society for imaginative play, the spirit of "what if," or the playful possibility of alternative realities—similar to the concept of costume play. The tent is expansive, accommodating various l ...

Writers Juggle Obligations That Interfere With Creative Work

Shannon Sanders describes the difficulty of writing her novel, The Great Wherever, while juggling a day job and caring for small children. Most of her writing took place late at night after her family was asleep, often while she was low on energy and managing various competing demands. Sanders emphasizes that there are countless reasons not to finish writing a novel because daily obligations constantly compete for a writer’s attention. She applauds anyone who manages to reach the end of such a demanding creative project.

Nocturnal, Isolated Nature of Novel Writing Demands Persistence Through Uncertainty

Sanders likens the process of writing a novel to "fumbling through the dark with a short candle," highlighting both the literal solitude of writing at night and the uncertainty inherent in guiding a creative project to completion. She points out that completing a novel requires a significant degree of commitment and endurance, and expresses admiration for writers who persist despite the isolation and ambiguity.

Writers Feel Emotional and Psychological Shifts After Finishing Major Works

Sanders Finds Ghost Characters Safely Situated, Not Demanding He ...