By Erin Bank 

Sunset District resident and San Francisco native Samantha Schoech (pronounced “Shay”) has been writing her entire life. Her most recent book “My Mother’s Boyfriends,” a collection of short stories, was published by 7.13 Books.

The compilation explores relationships between mothers and daughters, siblings, blood and found families, marriages and breakups. In the titular story, a young girl and her brother are left in the care of their mother’s boyfriend, leading to a near-tragic event. The young girl reflects on her mother’s series of boyfriends, each relationship with a similar nearly tragic ending.

“I’m really interested in the idea of good people making some really bad decisions,” Schoech said.

Schoech shows deep empathy for her characters. One reason for this, she explained, is that she did not realize how far her parents had been from the mainstream until she compared notes with college classmates.

“I grew up not just in the place of Northern California, but in the culture. My parents were hippies in the ’70s. I was raised in this very specific culture,” she said.

It was important for her to present her characters and their circumstances in a matter-of-fact way, without judgment, because they did not see their lives as anything but normal.

“These are the characters’ lives, and this is what it’s like,” she said.

Her stories are infused with a strong sense of place, prominently featuring Northern California. This was not intentional, Schoech said, but a function of telling stories that could only happen there.

“That’s where I live and where I spent most of my life. I’m not going to write about the sea breeze in Hawaii. I’m going to write about San Francisco fog because that’s my reference point,”she said.

There are only-in-California moments, featured in “The Good People of Lake George” from the collection. 

“California is on fire, the sky becoming that now-familiar yellow. A peach-colored light shines through the windows, eerily beautiful. Our friends have been evacuated from their home in the burning foothills. There are so many things to worry about.” 

Growing up in San Francisco and Marin County, Schoech remembers her parents reading to her from an early age. In sixth grade, she discovered “The Outsiders” and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the first books she read that dealt with difficult subjects.

“That kind of changed my whole view of what a book could be,” she said.

Schoech was drawn to books because she always felt there was a narrator in her head, telling the story of her life, the lives of others, as she went about her day.

“I remember as early as maybe 10, thinking, ‘Oh, I want to be a writer,’” she said. “I’ve always felt like there was no higher calling in the world than to work in books in some capacity.”

Her writing career has included working as an editor for Sunset magazine, writing ad copy for Twitter, and serving as book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. She is now a staff writer for The New York Times’ Wirecutter.

“I’ve always had a foot in the literary world,” she said.

Schoech also co-founded Independent Bookstore Day in 2014 and served as its program director for eight years. The idea stemmed from a conversation with her husband, a bookseller, about creating an event for independent bookstores similar to Record Store Day. The program began in California and soon spread nationally.

“Books are the love of my life,” Schoech said.

Their goal, she explained, was not to dwell on the challenges bookstores face from Amazon and big-box retailers, but to highlight the vibrant events, community-building, and special culture of independent bookstores.

“I wanted a place where the conversation would be positive and lively rather than ‘please shop here because we’re suffering,’” she said.

San Francisco was a natural home for the event, a place that Schoech said has such rich literary history and is full of people who read and who support bookstores and the literary arts. The writing community here, too, is collaborative and supportive, she said – not at all cut-throat and competitive.

It was always a dream of Schoech’s to write fiction, and she has published work in literary magazines and collections over the years. However, it was not until she took her first fiction writing class in college that she realized anyone could become a writer and even earn a living that way.

“I thought maybe you had to be chosen or anointed in some way,” she said. “I didn’t think it was the same as being a doctor or firefighter, where you could choose that path and train for it. It felt like a mystery, like saying, ‘I want to be a princess.’”

She can trace the first ideas and scenes she wrote for “My Mother’s Boyfriends” to when she was in her 20s. The 14 stories in the book were written over the years since then, and when she started putting them together for a book, she wrote a few more to fill out the collection.

Schoech did spend time away from the Bay Area in her youth, with her dad in Boston and Vermont and in college in Portland, Oregon. She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. 

She returned to San Francisco’s Sunset District in 1998 and has lived there ever since. She and her husband bought a home there because it was the only neighborhood they could afford. At the time, it felt like the end of the Earth. Now, she can not imagine living anywhere else.

“It’s our little hometown out here,” she said.

“My Mother’s Boyfriends” is available wherever books are sold, and Schoech encourages readers to support independent bookstores or purchase from Bookshop.org. She is currently working on a historical novel set in San Francisco.