Crafting a California Gothic
A conversation with J. Nicole Jones, author of The Witches of Bellinas
What lengths would you go to save your marriage? In The Witches of Bellinas, Tansy Green agrees to move to a sleepy, coastal California town with her husband Guy. They quickly become the newest members of the Bohemian Club, a hedonistic cult run by a tech mogul Manny and his ex-model wife Mia. Life in Bellinas is characterized by abundance, beauty, and ease, complete with a rainbow every day at 3 PM, but Tansy is instantly turned off by the patriarchal structure of the Bohemian Club. Caught between the nagging voice of her intuition and the promise of the perfect marriage she's always longed for, Tansy reevaluates the cost of idyllic enlightenment—rediscovering herself in the process.
Author J. Nicole Jones crafts a compelling California gothic, revealing the witchy secret behind a small coastal town filled with the beautiful elite. I interviewed Nicole over email, discussing whether the supernatural element allowed her to speak more candidly on topics like new age misinformation and misogyny, the experience of shifting from writing memoir to fiction, and the novel's feminist leanings.
Dear Frieda: Can you tell me about how this book came to you? Was there a specific starting scene or vision that grew into The Witches of Bellinas?
J. Nicole Jones: I spent a summer in a very beautiful, but similarly remote town in Northern California in 2016. It was meant to be a writing retreat to finish my memoir, what would become Low Country, and my husband and I had our car broken into: a smash and grab. I had very stupidly left my laptop and notebooks in the car, and I lost everything. I had nothing backed up (again, not the smartest). I wrote about it for Poets & Writers eventually, when I did publish the memoir in 2021, but it was totally restarted from page one.
So I was in this woodsy coastal cabin ostensibly to finish my first book, but I was heartbroken and had nothing to revise. I had a lot of anxiety and felt pretty terrible in this very beautiful place. I was haunted by this feeling that things weren’t quite right in this gorgeous town, and I couldn’t figure out if it was my own inner turmoil, feeling lost without this project, or if there was something odd about the town, or both.
About a year later, after I’d re-started what became Low Country, the first two paragraphs of The Witches of Bellinas just kind of came out, and they’ve remained largely the same since. The rest of the book has undergone many drafts and changes, but this voice that became Tansy’s voice really just tumbled onto the page one afternoon.
DF: Your writing style has this haunting, lyrical quality that I first noticed while reading your memoir Low Country. What influenced your way of writing and seeing the world from this angle?
JNJ: With Low Country especially, I was really leaning into the oral storytelling I grew up around in a very bombastic Southern family. Growing up in South Carolina, I felt as if ghosts stories were given the same weight and importance as history and facts (more so, with certain elements of history). Whether you believed in ghosts or not, they were treated as real: The local news would run a story about a sighting of the Gray Man before a hurricane. In Charleston, historical plaques are up on houses saying, “The ghost of this person lives here.” I really wanted to reclaim those ghost stories, but also that fabulist, oral-history voice for women.
With Witches and some of my other fiction, I think my style may just be shaped (scarred?) by those early storytelling experiences, hearing people chew the fat and shaggy dog stories. Hopefully it’s toned down a little in this. I do love a long-winded, lyrical sentence, and my favorite books tend to indulge in that too. I’m re-reading Midnight’s Children for the first time in a long time, but Salman Rushdie was probably the first literary writer I fell in love with as an adult. While some tastes evolve and I’ve been exposed to other styles I love, there is something really comforting about those stories, like Midnight’s Children, where the prose just spins like a top, going on and on, taking you unexpected places.
DF: The Witches of Bellinas lampoons Silicon Valley tech moguls and their passion for New Age aesthetics and misinformation, while simultaneously highlighting more dangerous elements of their mindset. Their distrust of vaccines, gluten, technology, and passion for stereotypical gender roles is all on display, ready to be picked apart by Tansy and the reader. Can you speak to this element of the novel?
JNJ: I’m really glad you asked about that. It’s so hard to ignore in life, especially now, but also when I was living in California. For a long time, very mistakenly, the media has pushed this myth of a meritocracy in Silicon Valley, of genius where really it’s just audacity and scams. Look at founders, at billionaires: They are overwhelmingly white men, born extremely wealthy. It’s easy, and satisfying, to lampoon these tech moguls for the ridiculous, absurd lavishness they surround themselves with, but the world they’ve succeeded in creating for the rest of us is extremely dangerous and terribly exclusionary.
And yet, it seems as if most of these figures believe themselves to be these revolutionary geniuses. When there are no consequences for your actions, when you’re hailed as brilliant by an incurious media, it’s probably very easy to accept a lot of the New Age manifestation doctrines that say things like, “You think yourself into your reality; you get the life you deserve.” Why are we pushing this narrative of a tech genius, when overwhelmingly, these people are exploiting the mental and physical labor, not to mention the art, of countless people. I really wanted to examine what I think is a dangerous intersection of some New Age thinking and the myth of meritocracy in Silicon Valley.
I tried to model Manny, the tech mogul, on an ex-pat character I’d read about in a travel memoir. This white guy lived in Thailand and seemed to brag about taking advantage of the locals, and I feel as if these tech moguls are ex-pats from humanity. Look at how many of them are buying up small towns and bunkers as prep for some kind of apocalyptic event that their own tech largely would play a hand in creating. AI and crypto are contributing more to energy consumption and climate change than anything before them.
DF: I was particularly interested in the way your descriptions of the natural world as threatening and destructive (the sea, the fires, the wind, the cliffs) are echoed in the women’s magic. While the women are able to harness the power of the winds, it’s never a completely malleable thing. Accidents happen. What inspired you to align the novel’s conception of magic with the unpredictability of the natural world?
JNJ: Just being in the landscape that inspired the town—coastal, Northern California. Compared with where I grew up in coastal South Carolina, where the water is very shallow and warm and calm, the beaches and Pacific Ocean are just gorgeous, but they’re so dangerous. The water is frigid, there are rocks and great white sharks, even though it’s this inviting, tropical turquoise. It’s so tempting to just want to dive right in. That made me think of predators in nature that are very beautiful, but dangerous, which could also be said of these women in Bellinas. I think of nature as very magical, I guess: the seasons, flowers in bloom, the northern lights. I know that sounds very pat, but I wanted to kind of ask what is the difference between magic and nature? Both are very powerful, but can be deadly, even for people. The weather is a perfect example of that.
DF: The Witches of Bellinas applies a curious slant to its conception of feminism. Tansy is the only character who seems increasingly alarmed or critical of the gender dynamics at play. Even when the truth about the winds comes to light, the women opt to “outsmart” the hubris and misogyny of their male counterparts by allowing them to believe they’re running the show, yet they still have to endure their behavior to continue living in Bellinas. Were you consciously reflecting the way overt societal change sometimes seem out of reach?
JNJ: The women of Bellinas have chosen a safety they can craft within the system that exists. Perhaps they are thinking that their wealth, their husbands’ wealth, their beauty, their influence or fame can save them, and I think that’s a tack a lot of women do choose in life. I’ll go along with what my husband or community or whoever is telling me, because it affords them a sense of safety and acceptance. Of course, it doesn’t though. No one is safe in a system, like any patriarchal system, that runs on hierarchy. They’re trying to take advantage of perhaps a weaponized incompetence the men show, but they are still trapping themselves in a system that values them only for what they can offer to men or in upholding it.
The tradwife conversation was not happening when I wrote this book, but it’s really hard for me to not see this in there now. There’s so much discussion of women turning to this lifestyle to opt out of capitalism, but they’re only able to do that appearance-wise because their husbands, overwhelmingly, are very rich. It’s all an illusion that serves a very conservative, regressive agenda that will ultimately throw them out once they’re no longer attractive in those expensive prairie dresses or can’t have any more children, or otherwise aren’t of use to those in charge, which is not them.
DF: The novel does deal with a fair bit of darkness, and while I don’t want to spoil the ending, I’m curious as to what inspired Tansy’s decision to stay in Bellinas and make peace with her role in her husband’s death, Manny’s violations, and the enforced lifestyle that felt so restrictive to her for much of the novel?
JNJ: I do think that trauma is very difficult to acknowledge, let alone start to deal with. Tansy’s very isolated and feels trapped. Even if the book has fantastical elements, I think that is something many women feel and have to deal with. For example, most women in abusive relationships attempt to leave multiple times. It’s very dangerous for them to leave. As an outsider, it’s so hard not to wring your hands and shout, “Why don’t you leave?” but the emotional, and pragmatic realities are so complicated and deserve a lot of compassion. It’s very difficult to be, or even to feel, trapped.
DF: How long did it take to write the book? I know you mentioned that you write long-hand. Were there challenges with that? Do you think writing by hand changes the way you think or write a project?
JNJ: I very loosely started thinking about the book in 2016 and got the first few grafs and an outline down in 2017. I probably finished the first draft a year later, but it’s been through at least three or four distinct drafts over the years. Other than the first page, it’s unrecognizable from the first draft. But yes, I do tend to draft longhand on legal pads. I like how it feels, being able to sit and doodle, or draw arrows and scratch things out. I think it feels like less pressure to me than a Word document. I think because I lost that first copy of Low Country without any backup, I have a chain of saving systems now. I’ll write by hand. Then I’ll type that into TextEdit. Then Word. Then a chapter into Scrivener. And I think you get good editing done that way, as well.
DF: How did the novel change over the course of writing and editing? Were there any surprises?
JNJ: It’s totally changed, except for the beginning, the first few grafs. I think that first draft was mostly vibes: What mood/location am I trying to get across? Then trying to figure out the plot in the next draft. Then the thematic lines I wanted to carry. I guess you do a bit of everything in each, but I’d say this book for sure had distinct phases of how it came to take shape. There were no witches in the first draft, but I was trying to figure out how to use magic, or fantasy elements, to bridge that gulf between the beauty of the land I was trying to capture and the sinister nature of the people and the town. So when it became clear what Tansy’s journey was, it was clear the magic had to be only practiced by the women—and then playing with witch tropes felt like a missing puzzle piece.
DF: Your descriptions of the California coast are so rich! Did you spend a lot of time there? Did you sense a possible connection between the coasts of South Carolina and California?
JNJ: I love the coast of California. The first time I visited, after college, I was just blown away by the contrast between the East and West coasts. I was immediately in love with how dramatic the landscape was, compared with how soft and soothing I felt like the lowcountry of South Carolina is. Not that it is without its own dangers, of course.
DF: How was the process of writing this book different from the process of writing your memoir Low Country?
JNJ: It was really freeing in a fun way. I felt so much pressure to get things right for my family in Low Country, as a tribute to my grandmother, especially, whose voice and stories I wanted to preserve. Even though this book certainly had challenges to figure out, it felt like it was more for me in a way, whereas Low Country felt very much like it is for the women in my family, for the idea of what it has meant to be a woman in the South and what it could mean.
DF: What’s next for you?
JNJ: I’m not sure! Hopefully, just lots more writing.
The Witches of Bellinas is on sale May 14th, 2024.
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For Parisians interested in indie publishing, zines, and art books, the Paris Ass Book Fair takes place Friday May 17th- Sunday May 19th at Palais de Tokyo.
