About Shannon
I am an American writer living in Lille, France. Getting here took the long way round.
Before I became a full-time writer, I was an architect, an improviser, a middle-school mathematics teacher, and a curriculum designer. All of those lives still find their way into what I make. Architecture taught me to notice structure and space. Improvisation taught me to follow what appears. Mathematics taught me to look for patterns. Teaching taught me that understanding often arrives in ways we cannot predict.
And then I moved to France and began paying even closer attention.
These days, I spend much of my time walking the old streets of Lille, writing in cafés, traveling by train, wandering through places with histories much longer than mine, and taking long walks with my dogs. I collect small moments: overheard conversations, peculiar coincidences, dreams, strangers, light falling across buildings, the feeling of arriving somewhere I somehow recognize.
I write what I call quiet fiction.
My stories tend not to be interested in enormous external events. Their crescendos happen beneath the surface. I’m fascinated by the instant when someone sees something differently and can no longer quite return to the person they were before. My fiction returns again and again to transformation, memory, belonging, grief, longing, identity, perception, and the complicated business of becoming fully oneself. If I have one mantra as an author, it's "No Plot Twists, No Deadlines."
Sometimes I write in conversation with stories we already carry. Juliet Becoming begins with Shakespeare. Through Glass looks through Lewis Carroll. After All wanders into the Brothers Grimm. I’m less interested in retelling familiar stories than in turning them slightly and asking what else might have been there all along.
Other books have arrived differently. Apricity grew from a planned walk through the Cotswolds and became a meditation on intuition, illness, love, and the warmth that persists before darkness arrives. Silence & Flame explores devotion, memory, and transformation. The Siren asks what happens when the innocence of a child draws a loose-knit community of adults into one another’s line of sight. My poetry collection, Night Murals, emerged largely from dreams and the strange emotional landscapes they leave behind.
Some of those works have begun living second lives in French, an unexpected and deeply meaningful development for a writer who now makes her home in France.
My nonfiction is more immediate. In The Long Way Round, my ongoing series of personal essays on Substack, I write from inside the life I am actually living: France, travel, creativity, grief, joy, friendship, dogs, music, becoming, and whatever else insists upon being noticed that day. My short prose has also appeared in Thin Places Journal.
And my urge to write, somewhat inconveniently, did not remain confined to words.
I make book trailers because sometimes I can see a story before I can explain it. I take photographs because occasionally noticing something is enough. I make music because every once in a while words apparently require sound. These other forms live alongside the books as what I think of as glimmers: different ways of paying attention to the same world.
That may be the thread connecting everything I make. Attention.
I believe ordinary lives contain extraordinary interior landscapes. I believe stories can be quiet without being small. I believe transformation often happens long before anybody else can see it. And I believe there is enormous value in stopping long enough to recognize what is already happening around us.
So I walk. I wander. I write things down. And, increasingly, I make whatever the noticing asks me to make.
Notice things, my darlings.
