Author of Baker’s Dozen
By Sarah Kloth
Baker’s Dozen begins with Shay Baker’s suicide, followed by a series of letters and photographs she leaves behind. What first led you to structure a story around these “ghosts of unanswered questions”?
DK: Shay existed between the boundaries of unasked questions – of herself and from those around her. She’d been committed to a life narrative that shaped her walk, her walls and her will. Initially, I wanted to expose her wounds and wreak havoc with her hurt. Having Shay frame a villain from the great beyond could have been a straightforward mystery; in my mind, shame is the story’s villain. The letters and photographs were answers, but to questions no one had known to ask. Through her loss, I was able to tease out the tension and confusion in a brand of grief that compels those left behind to not just ask “what happened” but also wonder “who was she, really?” The more I wrote and learned the character, I came to understand that picking open her scars was her odyssey inward, to a raw and less digestible truth.
The novel is often described as a kind of “whodunit of the heart.” How did you approach balancing mystery mechanics with the emotional weight of grief?
DK: With her unexpected death, Shay’s family and friends -Royal, in particular- were naturally seized by a fever to understand how and why. Bargaining and rationalizing are part of the grieving process as well as seedlings for doubt and delusion. Royal’s loss, alongside his unexamined emotions, made his character uniquely vulnerable to fixating and searching, leaving him to become the unwitting detective. I fueled his sleuthing and puzzling with a yearning to absolve himself. Having him gazing into his own navel, the larger mystery could find its way to him.
Shay is present in the book through what she leaves behind rather than direct narration. How did you think about building her character through absence?
DK: I first wrote this story as a screenplay. A writer friend who works in film and television challenged me to experiment with the genre. “It’s still storytelling,” he coaxed. On my next writing retreat, I tried it out. I floundered! It was like an exercise routine with hand weights that were slightly too heavy. I finished it, but it was a push. I knew that film relies on dialogue and action, on telling the story wholly out in the open. I wrestled with how to create a robust character without utilizing interiority or traditional flashbacks. While I probably didn’t write a blockbuster movie {my friend confirmed as much}, Shay and her story stuck with me. I wanted to transfer the story from a screenplay experiment back to my fiction wheelhouse. I’d already written around her in the screenplay version, with Royal onscreen doing all the heavy lifting in her name. I wanted Shay to continue haunting the story, as an active ghost and not a sentimental idea. I wrote her in the second person to make her feel distant AND for the reader to feel her story rather than judge her choices.
Photography plays a central role in Shay’s life and legacy. How does her visual perspective shape how characters (and readers) interpret her final messages?
DK: Portrait photography responds to an expectation, the final image reflecting the goals and intention of the subject. Staged. Curated. Poised. That Shay was a photographer with “an eye” for visual storytelling offers the reader two things: first, as a creative, she has the sensibility to see both nuance and grandeur in the everyday; second, the subjects of her photography work were invited to see themselves in unexpectedly tender ways. Having Shay express herself through photography embodied her lived contradictions -hiding and confronting, exposing and obscuring, document, decorate, love and lament.
Royal’s journey becomes a way of reconciling the Shay he knew with the one revealed after her death. What interested you most about that kind of emotional reckoning?
DK: I’m intrigued by the specter of shame. I’ve heard it explained that guilt is a feeling about what you’ve done, while shame is a feeling about who you are. Both emotions can govern behavior, but shame can sour the soul at a cellular level.
The external version of a person is often the projection of internal negotiations — sometimes ruthless battles — about how they want to see themselves and who they believe they are. Royal discovers the distance between the “projected” Shay and the “embattled” version of herself that she lived to hide.
Aren’t we all protecting some ugly blemish?
As Royal connects with others who received Shay’s final letters, the story becomes more communal than individual. What were you exploring about connection through shared loss?
DK: More than shared loss, the characters were each gifted the experience of being seen — generously and whole — through the most unlikely lens and eyes. As a result, they also shared the weight of Shay’s unsilenced scream, the one she’d filtered through pleasure and desire. One by one, they learned how their intimacies had plucked the strings of Shay’s trauma, even though she’d been smiling. I was exploring how our passions and interactions amount to a collision of galaxies, each person with their own constellation of scars, hurts, and flares.
The novel suggests we can never fully know even the people closest to us. What do you hope readers sit with most in that idea?
DK: I hope readers sit with the converse of this truth: the people closest to us can never fully know us, either. To the best of our awareness and ability, we tidy messes and tuck frayed edges in presenting ourselves to the world. We tell ourselves versions of our own stories. Even to those familiar with us, the drivers and forces that move us through these stories are unknowable outside of ourselves. Sometimes, unknowable even to ourselves.
You spent nearly a decade working on this story. How did your understanding of grief, or “recovering from a heavy heart,” evolve during that time?
DK: I’ve grown to appreciate the difference between grief and mourning — the former as an emotion and the latter as its embodiment. The distinction is important, especially when we find ourselves wanting to authorize or discount how others move through loss or pain. In writing and weaving these stories, I was equally convicted to push beyond episodes, happenings, and scenes. Their decisions are judge-worthy, and their heavy hearts can be seen as a penance. All matters of loss — life, love, ideals — confront our underlying landscapes, exposing the frailties we try hardest to hide.
Much of your work engages storytelling as a form of cultural reflection and change. How does Baker’s Dozen fit within that broader creative mission for you?
DK: I introduce myself these days as a Creative Change Agent. As an author, poet laureate, performance artist, facilitator, educator, curator — and and and … all of my endeavors and initiatives center creativity as both a strategy and tool. Through my fiction, I’m committed to shaping stories around the habits of conversation about mental wellness. My first book, All Fall Down, was a sensational, plot-driven story about a woman with a form of schizophrenia. I wanted the next story to feel less voyeuristic — ironic for a novel, I suppose. With Almost Crimson, I wrote instead about the delayed life of a girl whose mother suffered debilitating depression. I brought the reader closer to the character, and the illness — as in real life — became a key factor but not the sole focus of her world. With Baker’s Dozen, I continue to invite readers into an unfamiliar world to confront familiar social conversations, this time to explore and humanize abandonment, desire, grief, and shame.
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Article originally Published in the Summer 2026 Issue.