Samantha Browning Shea has been a literary agent for Georges Borchardt for fifteen years, where hse has worked on books that have been received numrerous honors and awards, including the “5 Under 35” honor from the National Book Foundation, the “Best of Young American Novelists” honor from Granta Magazine, the Kirkus Prize, the Whiting Award, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Now, with her debut novel, Marrow, Shea is ready to introduce readers to a world that explores femininity and power on a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven of witches tinkers with fertility.
We caught up with Shea via email, where we asked about being a literary agent, why magic and motherhood interested her, and how Marrow became her debut book.
What’s the relationship like between Literary Agent Samantha and Writer Samantha?
I think they’re in conversation more often than conflict. The writer in me makes space for the quiet – she’s the part that knows how long it can take to find the right metaphor, the right ending. And the agent in me knows how to advocate, how to protect that space. I didn’t go through an MFA program, so a lot of my education has come from my authors. Their books have shaped me. Their revisions, their resilience, their trust – those have been my lessons. Being a writer has helped me understand, in a more intimate way, what it feels like to put your work into the world. It’s terrifying. But it’s also sacred. And as an agent, I get to be the person standing next to you when you take that leap. To say: You don’t have to do this alone. I’ve got you.
You’ve been a literary agent since 2010 and your debut novel is coming out in 2025, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t a writer the entire time. What has your writing journey been like while being a literary agent?
I’ve been writing in the margins of my life for as long as I can remember. In college, it was mostly short stories, and then later, a novel about Jonestown that I wrote over the course of what felt like a decade – mostly because I kept treating it like a side hustle rather than a calling. It wasn’t until I started working with Marya Spence, my agent, that I felt the emotional infrastructure click into place. Just having someone waiting for my pages changed the way I showed up for the work. The Jonestown novel didn’t sell – and thank God, honestly – but it taught me how to finish something. It gave me the muscle to write MARROW with a kind of urgency and clarity I hadn’t accessed before.
I always love hearing what writers say their book is about instead of just relying on the book jacket copy. So, cutting through the marketing copy: What is Marrow to you?
For me, MARROW is a reckoning with longing – the kind of longing that rearranges your cells. Oona wants to be a mother, yes, but what the books’ really about is the holy madness of want. How it can lead us to places we never imagined we’d go. How it makes us bargain with the universe. There’s a wildness to that kind of desire that I really wanted to explore – not just the beauty or the heartbreak of it, but it’s heat, its volatility. MARROW is what happens when someone wants something so badly that the wanting itself becomes its own kind of power.
Now that we know what Marrow is about, I’d love to know what the genesis and inspiration for the book was.
Marrow began in the middle of a season I didn’t expect, one marked by waiting and quiet heartbreak. My husband and I had been trying to have a child for almost two years, and I found myself unraveling ways I didn’t see coming. Days became measured by doctor’s appointments and lab results. Everything else moved to the background. I had always believed I would be a mother one day. I just hadn’t imagined what it would feel like to want it so much.
Writing the novel started as a way to make sense of that longing, or maybe just to hold it somewhere outside of my body. I didn’t have a plot. I didn’t know where it was going. But I wrote towards that ache. I kept returning to a line from Sophie Mackintosh’s BLUE TICKET: “Wanting is a powerful magic.” It felt true – not just in the world of the novel, but in mine too. That want became the center of the story. Everything else grew from there.
How did you decide to weave magic and motherhood together?
I don’t know that I ever made a conscious decision. It felt more like something I returned to, something already living just under the surface. My mother has always been deeply spiritual – tarot, astrology, etc. When I was younger, I kept my distance, even as I found it strangely comforting. But when we were struggling to conceive, I started reaching for anything that felt like hope. I carved sigils into candles. I burned incense. I wrote things down and buried them in the dirt. It felt a little foolish and also a little like prayer.
So much of both magic and motherhood is about surrender – about wanting something and not knowing how or when or if it will come. To me, they’ve always felt linked. Mysterious. Sacred. Carried by belief.
The location and atmosphere of the book stood out to me. My father lives in Maine and I visit often. This felt very Maine. How did Maine lend itself to the moodiness and witchiness of the story, and vice versa?
That means a lot. Thank you. I’ve always felt there is something uncanny about Maine. It’s not only beautiful, though it certainly is. It’s also unyielding. The kind of place that holds memory like a tidepool. My mother spent her summers visiting cousins on Heron Island, and the stories she told me as a child, of cold mornings and pine-dark woods, always felt mythic, like something she was remembering from a dream.
When I started writing Marrow, I kept thinking of those landscapes. How the woods can feel close and watchful, how the air near the ocean always seems to be carrying the sound of someone’s voice. Maine gave me the emotional weather I needed for the novel. A place that could hold mystery and longing and still feel sold underfoot.
Before I let you go, I’d love to ask one more question about your work as a literary agent. I’m sure it’s different for every book, but what makes a book click with you and want to represent it?
It’s rarely something I can explain in real time. It’s a kind of quiet recognition, almost like the book is choosing me too. I know I’m in when I can’t stop thinking about the pages I read, or when I catch myself talking about a new project at dinner like it’s someone I just met and already care about.
I don’t need a book to be polished, but I do need it to feel alive, to feel like the writer is telling me something only they could tell. Sometimes it’s a voice. Sometimes it’s the shape of a thought. I just want to be surprised, and to feel something honest in the work. If I’m still carrying it with me days later – if I yearn for a physical copy I could press into a colleague’s hands – that’s when I know.