SAMANTHA BROWNING SHEA
"Appetite, Intuition, and Endurance"
Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the Vice President of Georges Borchardt, Inc., a literary agency. A graduate of Colgate University, she brings to her fiction a deep understanding of the literary world, shaped by years of working closely with writers and books. Her debut novel, Marrow, marks an impressive arrival on the literary scene and has drawn attention for its emotional depth and finely observed storytelling. I met Samantha at the Lighthouse Literary Festival, in Denver where we were sharing the stage. Pre-publication copies of the book were being distributed there. I picked up a copy and asked her to sign it after our reading. Samantha was shy, unassuming, and gracious—qualities that felt quietly at odds with the fierce emotional undercurrents of her novel. I started reading Marrow on my flight back to New York and was immediately pulled in. There was something magnetic about it—its undercurrent of longing, its brush with magic and ecstasy, its sense of healing that felt earned rather than sentimental. The writing was controlled but alive, simmering beneath the surface. At the time, I was revising my own novel about my years as a neophyte among Naga sadhus and shamans, trying to figure out how to weave ritual and altered states into narrative without losing the reader. Reading Marrow felt like a quiet lesson in exactly that—how to bring intensity and transformation onto the page while keeping the story grounded and compelling. I carried the book with me to Kathmandu and finished it there while scouting singing monks and shamans for the upcoming Himalayan Literature Festival. It felt fitting. The novel stayed with me, its questions about appetite, resilience, and emotional survival echoing in unexpected ways. In this conversation, Samantha talks about the making of Marrow, what sparked the story, how her publishing life intersects with her writing life, and what it means to trust intuition while enduring the long process of bringing a novel into the world. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters —YS
Yuyu Sharma: Can you describe the challenges of your journey from literary agent to author in writing Marrow and bringing it to publication? Did your experience as an agent prove to be a help, a challenge, or both? How has it shaped your approach to writing this novel?
Samantha Browning Shea: The shift from agent to author was less a career pivot than an identity negotiation. For years, I’d lived on the other side of the desk thinking about structure, markets, timelines, how a book would survive in the world. Writing Marrow required me to loosen that grip. I had to let myself be messier, slower, more exposed than I was used to being with other people’s work. That was surprisingly hard.
What ultimately helped most was realizing that the skills I’d built as an agent – patience, advocacy, determination – were transferrable. I just had to redirect them toward myself. Writing Marrow taught me what it actually means to trust a process I’ve watched hundreds of other writers endure. It made the journey to publication feel less like a professional milestone and more like a personal crossing: stepping into the same vulnerable terrain I’ve been asking others to walk for years.
Yuyu Sharma: First novels are often considered autobiographical, and many say that everyone has a novel within them waiting to be written. To what extent is Marrow autobiographical, and how much of yourself went into creating it?
Samantha Browning Shea: Marrow isn’t a memoir, but it is deeply shaped by my own experience. Like Oona, I was navigating infertility, and I wrote the novel in the midst of IVF treatments. The longing, the heartbreak, the way desire can feel almost tangible: all of that came from living through it myself. I didn’t set out to retell my story literally; instead, I gave the characters emotional truths drawn from my own life and let them move in ways I couldn’t. In that sense, the book is personal, but it also exists independently—a space to explore longing, hope, and resilience beyond my own circumstances.
Yuyu Sharma: Did writing Marrow involve any particular rituals, research, or immersion into witchcraft lore to capture authenticity?
Samantha Browning Shea: Yes, writing Marrow absolutely involved a kind of immersion. I spent a lot of time reading memoirs written by witches, spellbooks, folklore, anything that felt like it carried memory and magic. But I also created my own small rituals: lighting candles, carving sigils, burying little notes in the earth. Sometimes it felt like prayer, sometimes like play. It was less about being “authentic” to a historical practice and more about tuning myself into the emotional and spiritual truths of the story. Magic in the book is less about spells than about attention, intention, and surrender – the same way wanting something, or someone, can feel like a kind of power. Immersing myself in those practices helped me write from inside that feeling, so that the witchcraft and the longing could live together seamlessly on the page.
Yuyu Sharma: While the novel builds a Gothic world steeped in witchcraft and the supernatural, some readers may interpret it as ultimately dismissing these elements as gimmick, reflecting a Western skepticism toward spiritual or otherworldly practices. How do you respond to this reading?
Samantha Browning Shea: For me, the magic in Marrow is real, but it’s real on its own terms, not necessarily how Oona first imagines it. When I was going through IVF, I was desperate, and I encountered so many charlatans and quick fixes, people trying to take advantage of that kind of longing. That experience stayed with me and became part of what I wanted to explore in the book: what desperation makes us believe, who profits from it, and what might actually hold power.
At the same time, I wanted to leave space for ambiguity. Take the peppermint spell Oona performs at the end: is it the herb? The ritual? Or just her own desire, concentrated and released? I hope the reader feels that tension, because in my mind the magic is real, even if it doesn’t always conform to our expectations. It’s less about proving anything and more about living in the uncertainty between belief and skepticism, the way life, grief, and longing often are.
Yuyu Sharma: The scene of Oona feeding Gemma’s baby struck me with the quiet force of myth—it brought to mind the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, yet felt wholly your own, filled with tenderness and fierce grace. Could you share your literary influences, both American and international, and the writers who have shaped your work?
Samantha Browning Shea : I think I carry pieces of many writers with me, even if subconsciously, and it often shows up in the way I try to blend tenderness with tension. Charlotte McConaghy’s prose taught me how to make the natural world feel alive and urgent. Sophie Mackintosh’s work gave me permission to dwell in desire and disquiet, to let characters’ inner lives feel wild and strange. Leni Zumas and Rachel Yoder showed me how to explore the intimate, sometimes painful truths of women’s lives without flinching, how to give that interiority weight and grace.
I’ve also been deeply inspired by my own clients as a literary agent. Watching them trust the work, take risks, and find their voices has shaped the way I approach my own writing. I read widely, both American and international authors, and I’m drawn to voices that linger, that make the reader feel something almost mythic, like the quiet force you noticed in that scene with Oona and Gemma’s baby. These writers, and the writers I’ve represented, have shaped me not by offering templates, but by modeling the courage to write toward longing, grief, and love, in all its messy, luminous forms.
Yuyu Sharma: Oona’s mother and her dark world are portrayed as enigmatic and potently wicked. What inspired her character, and how did you navigate writing such a morally complex figure?
Samantha Browning Shea : Oona’s mother came from a mix of myth, memory, and what I think of as the earliest fertility stories, like the witch in Rapunzel. There’s something archetypal in that figure: powerful, frightening, morally ambiguous, but also deeply tied to creation, desire, and the life cycles we can’t control. I wanted her to feel alive in all her contradictions the way real people do, rather than simply “good” or “evil.”
Writing her meant inhabiting that gray space, leaning into both her darkness and her vitality. I tried to let her operate according to her own logic and her own needs, even when they collided with Oona’s world. The goal wasn’t to make her likable, but to make her feel necessary, essential, and human in the way that myths are: complex, mysterious, and capable of both harm and unexpected tenderness.
Yuyu Sharma: Were there moments during writing when Oona’s story surprised even you?
Samantha Browning Shea : Absolutely. Oona surprised me constantly. Early on, I imagined her arriving on the island with her desire for a baby as the driving force of the story, only to discover, through revision, that her primary motivation needed to be something deeper: magic, and more than that, belonging to her family of origin. That realization shifted everything. Her longing for a child became entwined with, but secondary to, her need to claim her inheritance, her power, and her place in that lineage. It was surprising and thrilling to watch her story reorganize itself this way, to see her desire and her identity emerge in ways I hadn’t anticipated when I first put pen to page. Writing Marrow became as much about discovering her as it was about shaping her.
Yuyu Sharma: What do you hope readers take away from Oona’s journey—about femininity, resilience, and the choices we make to claim our own power?
Samantha Browning: Shea I hope readers see Oona’s journey as an exploration of what it means to want something fiercely and still remain whole. Her story isn’t about perfect choices or clean victories. It’s about listening to a pull that feels older than reason and learning how to live inside it. For me, femininity in Marrow isn’t softness or sacrifice; it’s appetite, intuition, and endurance. It’s the ability to keep going even when the path forward is unclear.
Resilience, in Oona’s case, doesn’t look like overcoming everything. It looks like deciding what she will and won’t surrender. The choices she makes are complicated and sometimes unsettling, but they’re also acts of self-definition. I hope readers come away feeling that power doesn’t always arrive as triumph. It often comes as recognition: of where you belong, what you believe, and what you’re willing to risk to claim it.
Yuyu Sharma: Are you working on another book? Could you share any updates on your future creative plans?
Samantha Browning Shea : I am! It’s still in the early stages, but it’s shaping up as a mystery/suspense novel set on an oyster farm in Cape Cod. I’m excited to explore the edges between reality and magic again – creating that same kind of tension and wonder I loved weaving into Marrow. There’s a lot I’m still discovering about the story, but I hope it will feel atmospheric, eerie, and a little wild in the way the setting and the characters allow.
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