Sonia Horowitz

An Interview with Sarah Cedeño

Sarah Cedeño is the author of The Grand Scheme of Things, her debut story collection published by Harbor Editions in July of 2025. She is also the au-thor of a collection of essays titled, Not Something We Discuss Often. Cedeño teaches writing at her alma mater, SUNY Brockport, and also lives in Brock-port with her husband, two sons, some old ghosts, and two German shep-herds. Her work can be found in Brevity, Salamander, The Journal, The Pinch, The Baltimore Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Gandy Dancer: While reading The Grand Scheme of Things, I was struck by how personal and dark the collection felt, as there were a lot of themes about motherhood, death, and illness, with chronic illness being a major el-ement of your previous collection of essays Not Something We Discuss Often. What experiences from your own life inspired you to write these stories and why did you feel like you needed to write this collection?

Sarah Cedeño: I was spending a lot of time in the New York State digitized newspaper database researching the house we lived in at the time. Because I’ve always been a local history nerd, I became engrossed in the spectacles and everydayness in the Brockport Republic/Democrat. News stories served as an inspiration to explore the emotional sides of the articles to create characters. We don’t always have historical journals to capture everyday lives, so I used newspapers to glimpse what life was like for residents at that time. A lot of the details in this collection were inspired by the advertisements, personal ads, images, and editorials surrounding the articles. And naturally, all that inspi-ration gets combined with my own curiosities, fears, memories, dreams, etc.

GD: In the story, “Primal,” you write, “children and parents were meant to live in separate worlds.” In just one line, you break free from the common con-ception that a child naturally exists in their parent’s world, as they were the one who granted them life and existence. I deeply admire how it recognizes the disjointed yet realness to familiar relationships, which is incorporated in some way in all of your stories. Why do you think it is important to examine these types of relationships, especially in fiction?

SC: It was important to me to explore familial relationships because they are central to who we become, because we’re all flawed and fine; because both parents and children are living their lives for the first time, and it can be hard to bridge an invisible gap. We are next to each other, regardless of age, but it’s difficult amidst life’s sometimes troubling circumstances, to remember those boundaries. In the generations that these stories take place, people weren’t thinking so much about boundaries. As a child, Josie couldn’t have fathomed how it would occur to Carla to know that her daughter was suicidal, and worse, to have her child’s friend reveal this to her. I think these disconnects are worth trying to understand, however late, as Josie does in “Primal.”

GD: You use a number of different points of view and perspective across this collection. In “You Hear Night Sounds,” Jimmy, the narrator, who grapples with his father dying from dementia, is in a second person point of view, which places us directly in the unbalanced and violent behavior he’s expe-riencing. In “Professor Bird,” Lottie, the protagonist, has an affair with her professor and is in a third person point of view, which allows us to ques-tion what motivates her need for validation from the patriarchy. How do you choose which point of view fits best for each story, and did you intentionally try to vary the perspectives in these stories?

SC: I don’t usually plan out the point of view, but with “You Hear Night Sounds,” I wanted the unsettling impact the second person has on the nar-rative, to suggest the reader has entered Jimmy’s mind, as “you.” I’m most likely to default to a close third person when starting a story, and then that can change based on how the story develops. For example, “Dear Victor, If I Could Write You a Letter,” eventually changed to first person because it took on the form of a letter. Lottie’s narration, “In Professor Bird” stayed in a close third perspective. That closeness encourages the reader to slip into her experience.

GD: The settings in The Grand Scheme of Things all take place in the fictional town of Bridgeport with references to real areas in Western New York such as the Erie Canal and many college campuses, like Bridgeport State Teach-er’s College, which I am assuming is in reference to SUNY Brockport’s early name. When writing a story, is setting the initial thing you establish, and what drew you into writing a setting that is “close to home”?

SC: I think of setting as the threshold for readers to step into the story. Before I began the collection, I had decided to write a story cycle linked by place, a version of Brockport. I’m charmed and inspired by the village. When I found the digitized newspaper database (www.newyorkstatehistoricnewspapers.org), I spent hours exploring stories. It was a treasure trove of people and events.

GD: I wasn’t familiar with the phrase you use as your title. The protagonist of “The Wash” says “in the grand scheme of things, we are all harbingers of something.” In this instance, she’s tracing all the events that led up to her son’s drowning in the canal. In that moment, she understands her own pow-erlessness. Many of your characters are in similar situations in which they come to terms with their own lack of power or agency to change the things that most trouble them. How did you choose this title and did it come before or after writing the collection?

SC: The title didn’t occur to me until the year before the book was published, several years after completing the first draft. My family was driving to a hockey game, and some minor “thing” became bigger than it needed to be, and I said, “In the grand scheme of things,” and thought, Oh. That could be a title. It was universal and recognizable. The saying also implies that there is a grand scheme of things, and that we are all operators in that scheme.

GD: You begin with an epigram from Alice Munro, who was recognized by the Nobel committee as a master of the contemporary short story. The quote reads, “Nobody knew the sober, victorious feeling she had sometimes, when she knew how much she was on her own.” I admired how this quote related to a lot of the character’s awareness of having to rely solely on themselves, even if that was what they needed or not. Did Munro’s work inspire you while writing, and was this quote something you kept in mind while think-ing about these stories?

SC: I was reading a lot of Alice Munro during my MFA, while I was writing these stories. The richness of her stories, her focus on women’s perspectives, and her inspiration from local history all inspired me. I didn’t have the quote in mind as I wrote the stories, but came across it while re-reading, so I took it as kismet. I think a lot of the characters in the collection feel alone, maybe because they are coming to terms with life as an individual journey, which is especially difficult in the midst of societal and personal pressures or expecta-tions.

GD: I was pleased that the final story, “Cold Storage,” was written as a no-vella, rather than a short story. The story is set during the Vietnam War, as teenage June leaves St. Barnabas, a home for unwed mothers. She considers returning to college, but instead returns home to divorced parents, and a mother who is dealing with Multiple Sclerosis. Can you talk about how this story came about? When did you know this would be a novella rather than a short story?

SC: I knew “Cold Storage” would be a novella rather than a short story be-cause of the scope of the conflicts. There are several complex threads co-alescing in June’s life, and each complicates the others. I knew it would take space to tell the story. It was partly inspired by time I’d spent with my father researching rolls from the Catholic Charities when I was younger, trying to locate the child a family member had given up for adoption. I wanted to explore that complex loss and the disorienting setting of a Home for Unwed Mothers. I read a heartbreaking nonfiction book titled The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler to get a sense of the experiences of women who were sent there. With June’s mother, Alice, I wrote into my fears of what illness can do to the body, and how it can alter our lives profoundly and without warning.

GD: The stories in this collection flowed into each other quite beautifully, and it didn’t feel like there was any story that didn’t earn its keep. How did you determine the order of these stories, and is that something you keep in mind while writing them?

SC: There were many things I considered when ordering the stories—it’s of-ten suggested to put your strongest stories first. I thought “Cold Storage,” the novella, was the strongest of all the pieces, but it felt strange to put a novella first, in my mind, too front-loaded. It made more sense at the end. I went with “The Wash” first. It was the first story I wrote for my MFA program, inspired by an article I discovered in which a dog named Idaho was put on trial for the murder of a 14-year-old boy. It was a huge news story at the time, in 1936, covered by the New York Times and Paramount Pictures’s “The Eyes and Ears of the World.” That the story was a real-life spectacle gave it the interest to put first. It’s also the earliest, chronologically, so it set the feel of historical fiction, grounding the reader back in time. Beyond that, I con-sidered the types of relationships featured in the stories. I considered length to balance the movement. There was a lot of switching around! To make the process simpler, I printed versions of the stories for easy access to content, stapled them individually, and laid them out on the floor, rearranging them as I made decisions.

GD: I had the opportunity to meet you in person and was inspired by how you described your writing process. What advice would you give to some-one who is interested in writing a short story collection?

SC: Read a lot of story collections. Be open to the world. Seek and hoard what’s interesting to you. Be stubborn in the interest of your characters—give them their epiphanies. Have fun. Tear a story apart and put it back together (save all drafts). Distill your writing by cutting the word count of your stories as much as you can. Trust the process.