“I would work, work, work while I was sick, and then revise my book,” she says.Īs for whether she believes in magic? Maybe not the kind the Montrose women practice - but definitely the kind of everyday life. īrown describes what followed as “the craziest week ever.” The same day she received the call, Brown learned she had COVID-19 - and was still working 50 hours on COVID response in Long Beach, California. A couple weeks later, the person who would become my editor called and said, ‘I think I'd like to see the whole thing,” she says. Graydon House, a publishing imprint of HarperCollins, put out an open call for un-agented fiction from Black authors - meaning people, like Brown, who had a completed novel but no literary agent (usually a prerequisite for getting published). In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, Brown took note of organizations doing more than “posting a black box on Instagram” when it came to structural racism. “I just loved the story so much that I didn't want to let it go,” she says. The book stayed on the shelf as a manuscript, but she never gave up hope. After completing a draft, Brown went through multiple rejections. “Black Candle Women” took a decade-long journey from MFA thesis to published novel. “I’m a huge fan of Zora Neale Hurston, and some of her early work described spells and processes people used to try and ward against evil or manipulate things to make them go their way,” she says. She built up a reference library - like Denise Alvarado’s “Hoodoo Voodoo Spellbook” - while writing the book. Augusta, the matriarch, is inspired by her mom’s “creativity and craftiness.” The other characters, like sisters Willow and Augusta, were Brown “taking on personalities that were much different than mine.”
Her own family informs a few of the characters: Nikki, a teenager, is inspired by each of her four daughters. The Montrose women have an ancestor with ties to voodoo, and she passes down her abilities to one person in each generation. “And I really wanted a sister.”īrown got her big family, in the end, by having four daughters of her own - and by inventing the magical Montrose women. I always wanted that big family, I wanted to know my history,” she says. “I created this family that I thought would be interesting. The book was inspired by her family - or rather, the family she wished she had growing up. Speaking to, Brown says she began writing the novel in her creative writing program, which she balanced alongside her career in public health.
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