Joshunda Sanders: On Uncovering Marginalized Stories in Historical Fiction
Joshunda Sanders is an award-winning author, journalist and speechwriter. A former Obama Administration political appointee, her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, The Key West Literary Seminars and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Joshunda Sanders
In this post, Joshunda shares what inspired her debut novel Women of the Post, why writers should view themselves as businesses, how important discipline is when it comes to writing, and more.
Name: Joshunda Sanders
Literary agent: Elisabeth Weed, The Book Group
Book title: Women of the Post
Publisher: Park Row Books
Release date: July 18, 2023
Genre/category: Historical Fiction
Previous titles: I Can Write the World, How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans.
Elevator pitch for the book: A League of Their Own meets Hidden Figures in the story of a woman who escapes the dead-end work of the Bronx Slave Market to join 855 Black women in the pioneering Six Triple Eight postal battalion, which cleared about 17 million pieces of backlogged mail to improve morale for troops during World War II.
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What prompted you to write this book?
About 12 years ago, during a particularly stressful time in my family, I woke up in the middle of the night with the image of the main character who would become Judy Washington in my mind. She was wearing what looked like men’s clothing, sitting in a kitchen, bereft. She had to go somewhere, but she wasn’t from this generation or time period, and I had no idea what she wanted with me.
I wrote the beginnings of what I thought she might be trying to say but the book wasn’t working. I put it aside, I published some other work, including a novella and a memoir and a book about racism in journalism.
At the beginning of 2017, I left one intense position—albeit one I loved—working in the Obama Administration at the Department of Energy for another one, working for a petition-based startup based in New York City. At the same time as the political divisions in this country were beginning to deepen and emerge in a seriously depressing, outrageous way, with the global Women’s March, with a slew of Executive Orders undoing many years of progress in the first weeks of the new presidency, I found sanctuary in a two-week residency at Hedgebrook.
In an effort to find good news, I came across an obituary for Alyce Dixon, who was over 100 years old when she died. She had changed her name and gone to the Women’s Army Corps and served in the Six Triple Eight. I’m fairly well read and educated, so I was fascinated by this woman, the WACs, which I had never heard of, and of course, enamored of the pioneering Black women who served during World War II that it seemed at that time that history had forgotten.
And then I understood where Judy needed to go, so I fell down a rabbit hole of research and writing for the next four years. I was compelled to write this book because it felt like an injustice to me that few people had taken the time to imagine the lives and desires and joys of these Black women. I wanted to offer that up, to try and imagine the kind of courage it took for them to leave their homes and families and domestic expectations in order to serve in an Army that also didn’t really accommodate them, and for many of them, did not really give them their flowers while they were alive.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It has taken 12 years to go from the original idea to publication. Six of those years involved the work of many drafts, further research and changing the structure and points of view in the book. The idea shifted over time because I wanted to include the story of Black male veterans, namely Judy’s father, more prominently in the book.
One of my beta readers asked, “Why are all these men here?” And it made me laugh, because I hadn’t really thought about it. When I’m drafting, I really let all the folks who want to show up hang out, but of course, they can’t always stay.
There are just so few narratives that attend to the unique, valiant, and paradoxical experience of Black veterans in this country’s great wars, I felt a big responsibility to represent the experience broadly if I could. It took a few years to come to the published version, with the three points of view, and the letters that frame each chapter.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
It’s interesting to be publishing a debut novel at 45 years old. I’m actually really glad I’ve had a variety of publishing experiences to this point—as a journalist across mediums, and with a book with a small academic press, but also self-publication on the web and in print. I learned that it’s important to really separate out the business side of finding the right agent and finding the right editor from the writing of the work.
I’m an empath, I try not to take rejection personally after all these years, but publishing is tough on the ego, rough on the heart, all the machinations of writing and publishing and trying to be an honest, open-hearted writer in the midst of capitalism. But at the end of the day, publishing is a business.
So I learned to put on my business hat when the writing was done, and think as the entrepreneur I’ve been all my life, which is a label I think a lot of writers don’t apply to ourselves. But we are our own businesses, whether we like to think of ourselves that way or not. Publishers certainly look at us, our sales, our brand, through that lens.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I love writing fiction and I love history, and yet, it had never occurred to me to write historical fiction, or that it was a genre that I could explore. Writing is hard, that’s no surprise, but writing historical fiction adds to the challenges of conveying character’s dreams and motivations—to themselves and others—in a lot of ways.
In the case of Women of the Post, I wanted to stay true to what I imagined to be some of the rich inner experiences of the Six Triple Eight while also being slightly infuriated that even in the 2020s, gaps in the archive of Black women’s work in the U.S., and our intimacies, our inner lives are still so profound. I was surprised at how hard I had to look for the everyday experiences of Black women beyond work they did for money.
It gave me room and opportunity to dream up interactions and adventures, to overlay a kind of freedom of movement that couldn’t have been possible. But it was still surprising to note that being marginalized out of history books and narratives about service to this country also meant that there is an absence of our true voices and selves as Black people and women.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I have often believed that making a life choice that turned out unexpectedly would ruin my life, but that has, fortunately, never really been true. I hope understanding and seeing the choices that the characters in Women of the Post make, thinking about the specific restrictions and problems of the era that came to bear on those choices, seeing the full, unique, and beautiful lives and sisterhood that came out of those choices will be an inspiration to readers to continue reaching boldly into the unknown.
We live in a time where you can find information very easily to inform the next step on your path. We have a lot to learn from Black women, who are at the very bottom of the global societal hierarchy in terms of power, respect, dignity, and freedom, who shaped an amazing legacy with their courage, and their heart—no search engines or platforms.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
A frequent question or comment that comes my way, wistfully, is, “How do you find time to write?” And the answer is that I have never found extra time, because it doesn’t exist. I make time.
Other very busy Black women have said the same: The only thing you can do is make the time. Look at someone like Stacey Abrams, who ran for Governor and also writes novels—she has said the same, that she makes excellent use of her time. Make the time: Get up early, stay up late—get into a rhythm that is responsive to the demands of your life.
No writer can tell you what process is going to work for you, you just have to sit down and get after it. This kind of discipline pays off—it may take a decade, it may take a couple of years. But if you never make time, even a few minutes at a time, you’ll always be the person asking this question.