A Witch Awakens: A Fire Circle Mystery
by Ellis Elliott
About A Witch Awakens
A Witch Awakens: A Fire Circle Mystery
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – In the Tennessee mountains
Publisher: Hawkshaw Press (May 19, 2025)
Number of Pages: 238
Digital ASIN : B0F5LDHNY1
A Witch Awakens is about an accidental detective CeCe (Tennessee) Brown, who returns home to Tennessee after deciding the Big Apple just didn’t suit her. While working as the local ballet teacher she helps her friend Bess to put on the annual Fall Ball. Unfortunately, during a thunderstorm the night of the ball, one of the town’s most notable women is found dead. CeCe was very close to the victim, and begins to have little dizzy spells where she starts to get pictures of things around her town, and feelings compelling her to visit certain locations. Under the guidance of her grandmother and her Aunt Granny, CeCe begins to realize she shares a family proclivity for a bit of second sight. It’s a story where CeCe solves a mystery, but also begins to accept who she is, and where she’s from, and what makes her little town, and herself, special. She solves the mystery of herself.
GUEST POST
Why would a cozy mystery include everything from herbal folk medicine to dollhouse-making? Or include a failed professional dancer-turned-dance-teacher with an old mountain woman mixing herbal tea and quoting Bible verses?
When I first started forming the ideas for this book I was sure of only one thing; that I wanted to make it fun for me to write. I reasoned that I was of an age that I had forced myself long enough to do, write, act, in many ways that weren’t always of my choosing, but were required of my job or place in life at the time. This time, I wanted to bring some of my own family history and some of my interests and hobbies into the story of the book. I even wanted to bring in some things I wished I could do, like being a top-notch iced sugar-cookie baker and decorator! I mean, why not?
Two of our main characters, Nana and Aunt Granny Hazel, were inspired by my own grandmother and her sister in East Tennessee. Both grew up in a little house on the side of a mountain. One stayed in the same house she was born in until she died and she never married or had children. The other moved “to town”, went to college, married, had a child, became a teacher, and eventually became a school principal. One wore thin cotton dresses and old leather work boots, the other wore wool suits and had her hair and nails done once a week. They were as different as night and day, but they were fiercely devoted to each other and their other five siblings. Whether being the first to go to college or farming and making herbal remedies, both women were resilient, hard-working, and independent.
The dollhouse-making and dance-teaching are from my own lived experience. I’ve taught dance for over forty years, running my own studio at one time, and still teaching in an afterschool arts program. While I never tried to make it professionally as a dancer in New York, I had my share of failed auditions, and a good dance-teacher friend of mine had been a Radio City Rockette, like Nana in the book. What I knew was the experience of teaching dance to preschoolers was like herding cats with sequins on. I knew what it felt like to teach students with so much talent, but little resources of their own. I also have had a lifelong love of miniatures and in the last ten years have been building, furnishing, and decorating my own dollhouses. And it’s funny how you can find the intersection of these experiences with a murder mystery, since choreographing a dance and building a dollhouse both require putting different elements together in new and unique ways, like solving a crime!
One of the anchors in this book is something called “The Fire Circle”, which is a group of longtime women friends. I have had the gift of such circles of friends, one of which has lasted almost forty years. We call ourselves “Sistahs” and I am the youngest of the group. We have seen each other through marriage, divorce, parenthood, careers, and numerous other life events. Each of us add our own distinct flavor to the group, including age and upbringing, which allows us to both learn and teach one another, while staying rooted in the unconditional love that binds us.
In the end, I definitely was able to find the fun in the writing process that I’d sought from the start. There are numerous other connections between my life and this book, as well as a heaping scoop of my own imagination.
If you were to write a novel, what of your own life experiences or hobbies would you include? Do you have your own “Fire Circle” of friends? Please feel free to write to me at ellis@bewildernesswriting.com. I’d love to hear from you!
About Ellis Elliot
ELLIS ELLIOTT is a facilitator of the online writing group Bewilderness Writing. She also teaches writing and ballet in an after-school arts education program. Ellis holds an MFA from Queens University. She is a contributing writer for the Southern Review of Books, and serves as an editor/workshop instructor for The Dewdrop contemplative journal.
She is the author of the 2023 poetry chapbook, Break in the Field (Old Scratch Press), which KIRKUS calls “A deeply felt collection of candid verse.” Her work can also be found in numerous publications, including Signal Mountain Review, Plainsongs Poetry Magazine/Award Poem, Euphony Journal, and the Women of Appalachia Project Anthology. Ellis has a blended family consisting of six grown sons. She resides in West Palm Beach, Florida, with her husband, Tim, and a feisty dog named Mabel.
Author Links
- Website: https://bewildernesswriting.squarespace.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bewildernesswriting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elliselliott2020
- LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/ellis-gatewood-elliott-30ab4059
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