J. Nicole Jones received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. She has held editorial positions at VICE magazine and VanityFair.com. Her essays and writing have appeared in VICE, VanityFair.com, the Harper’s Magazine website, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers, and others. She is the author of Low Country: A Memoir and The Witches of Bellinas.

First off, thank you for taking the time for this interview! Could you introduce yourself and your work for those not familiar with you?

I’m so happy to—thank you for reading! My name is J. Nicole Jones, and I’m a writer, editor, and author of two books so far. I grew up in South Carolina mostly, which I wrote about in a memoir, Low Country. I moved to New York to study creative writing at grad school and ended up working in the magazine world. I started out on a pretty standard track, writing essays, reviews, and newsy articles, all while dreaming of books I wanted to write.

You published Low Country: A Memoir (Catapult) in 2021, and now you have the forthcoming (and debut in fiction!) The Witches of Bellinas (Catapult) coming in May 2024. Could you pitch us both?

Low Country is a memoir that weaves together my family’s strange, unlikely history in the South Carolina lowcountry, including my dad’s dream of becoming a country music star in the ’90s, and the fantastical folktales and ghost stories of the region. It came out in paperback on April 9th. A review quote I really love came from Charleston’s Post and Courier: “Like listening to a country music song written by Dostoyevsky.”

My new novel, The Witches of Bellinas, is a little bit different. It’s about a woman who moves to a mysterious coastal town in Northern California with her husband and discovers a cult—and maybe some magic. I guess I’d say it’s literary horror. It’s been called gothic and eerie, which is cool. I hope it’s a suspenseful, fun read—even though it opens with a confession from the main character, trying to explain how her husband ended up dead in this spooky little town.

The Witches of Bellinas is described as a “dreamy California Gothic.” The prose certainly fits that vibe. What was the initial idea or inspiration for the story?

I have spent a lot of time in Northern California and lived in coastal, isolated towns like Bellinas. I love how different the land is compared with the very gentle, soft landscape where I grew up. Everything feels very dramatic in California: the fog, the cliffs, the ocean. I love the nature there, but it can shift quickly and get scary fast. There can also be a topsy-turvy feeling to the weather, especially if you’re from the East Coast. The June Gloom, the cold summers, the fire season, the rainy season. It’s so seductive and beautiful, but also menacing.

The first inspiration for this came after I had spent a summer living in one of these stunning, but eerily remote California towns. My husband was working in San Francisco during the days, and I’d go for walks and feel so in awe of the nature but come home alone to this weird house in the middle of nowhere. I had actually just had my first manuscript for Low Country and computer stolen from our car, after a smash and grab in Oakland, and had lost all my writing. I backed up nothing, and I was feeling a lot of grief. Looking back, a lot of the isolation I was feeling was less about the geography of this town, and more about being without this writing that I’d poured my heart into for years, with the prospect of starting over feeling impossibly daunting. So I did sort of experience some of what Tansy, my main character does: grieving some integral sense of who I was, but in the most gorgeous setting. That disconnect of feeling like “I should be happy here. It’s too beautiful for me to stay sad” is very familiar to me.

What’s your writing process in general? Did you do a lot of research and outlining? Any rituals you swear by?

I wish that I did have rituals. I guess I have at different times in my life. Right now, I have a full-time job, so my ritual is trying to drag myself out of bed to write before work, which I’m not always successful at. But I think since I’ve been doing this for a while now, I try not to beat myself up about it. I try to remind myself that I’ve had different habits that worked for different periods in my life. I just read an interview where Kelly Link talks about her process of needing breaks and stuff going on in the background, which is so real and forgiving, not at all monk-like. It made me feel better.

In general, I think the first line or two sort of just pops into my head, and I’ll write a paragraph or two from there, and if I like the voice, I’ll keep going. The first few pages of both my memoir (after I started over, post-smash and grab) and this novel have changed very little from when I first wrote them. But the rest changed a ton and went through many different versions.

Were there any difficulties or frustrations transitioning from Low Country to The Witches of Bellinas? From nonfiction to fiction?

When I was at grad school in the creative nonfiction program, I definitely never thought I’d write fiction, even though I read as much fiction as nonfiction and took fiction and poetry lectures. Now, I have more fiction than nonfiction out there or in progress. I just love the feel and sound of a good voice, no matter what the genre.

Back then, I probably would have anticipated some difficulties, but it’s largely been really similar. I did a lot of research for both books, though it’s incorporated slightly differently. After my memoir, where I felt a lot of pressure to get it right for my family, I found this novel really freeing. I definitely had frustrations, in terms of drafting and figuring out how things worked in the world I was trying to create, but I think that may just be what happens with different books, no matter what genre. The problem-solving element can be really fun and thrilling when you aren’t tearing your hair out over it.

You’ve held editorial positions at VICE and VanityFair.com and have published widely across so many platforms. How has some of that experience affected your writing?

Well, RIP VICE . . . I hope that being an editor makes me a better writer. I think it does in that I have been lucky enough to observe wonderful writers and how gracious and creative they are in the editing process. If you understand that all work needs at least some editing, and that you’re very lucky to have someone engage with your work thoughtfully, I think it helps you become a better writer. Being good at being edited, I think, is a skill the very best writers have.

Bellinas opens with Tansy admitting that things have already gone horribly, horribly wrong. And throughout the novel, her authorial voice pops in to remind us that bad things are coming our way very soon. What made you come up with this decision? It lends a sense of terror and unease that I quite enjoyed.

I was hoping it would be scary, but I wasn’t totally sure how to get there. Those reminders were almost the most fun parts to write because I could be dry and have fun with some gallows humor, but it could let us see Tansy’s understanding of events evolving and her real fears about what is going to happen to her as we get to the ending. Tansy’s voice was the first thing that I had, and I loved getting to imagine how she would spin things.

When I had the few lines that open the novel a few months after that terrible summer when my work was stolen, it became really fun to shape those bad feelings into a new narrative I could actually control.

There’s an underlying (and not so underlying) horror regarding community in this novel. Tansy’s husband, Guy, wants very much to be a part of “community,” but I get the sense he doesn’t really know what that means. At what point does community become toxic or harmful?

I don’t think I have a definitive answer, but I imagine many people have wondered that in the last few years: whether looking at terrifying political movements sweeping the world, or the pit of social media that was touted as this great connector and has turned out to be the opposite.

Thinking about the toxic elements of community that connected for me in Shirley Jackson stories, there’s a suffocating feeling that community can induce, especially when we’re discovering something about ourselves as individuals. The communities of family or faith or a town shape us, not always for the better. It takes a lot of courage to notice and stand up when something is not right in a community, even a small one. At the same time, it’s also natural and important to feel like you belong, to find your community. There’s that friction between the need to be recognized as an individual and the need to feel like you belong to something bigger that’s very interesting to me.

One element that I hope comes across is the horror of sameness. In Bellinas, all the people look alike, every day feels the same, everything is “perfect,” according to a very old-fashioned societal image of perfection. People are youthful, blonde, white, affluent, there’s sunshine all the time, every day is temperate. That is a good place to start looking at toxicity or harm in communities: Does it look all the same? Does everyone have access to the same things or not? The Big Tech character is very welcoming to Tansy, but that does not extend to everyone, we see later. There is an exclusionary element to his idea of community that is very toxic.

At the forefront of Bellinas is a cult—the Bohemian Club—and like so many real-world cults they use certain tactics and environments to manipulate people, Guy and Tansy included. Was the Bohemian Club based on any actual cults? This is the type of cult I feel like would have a documentary about it one day.

That would be so fun. I am fascinated by cults and cult-thinking, like a lot of people. In the book, this Bohemian Club’s founding is influenced by the turn-of-the-century Bohemian Club, an artistic community in Carmel that had a lot of progressive ideas and a lot of tragedy, but other than that, it is not based on any one club in particular. I did a lot of research on why people join cults and the tactics leaders and members use to recruit. Really smart, educated people join cults. Everyone thinks they’d never be susceptible, but most of us probably are.

I tried to lightly draw from the sexual tactics the Children of God are famous for (“flirty fishing”), and then with the Source Family, there were a lot of celebrities adjacent to that cult. Their restaurant was very trendy in LA in the 1970s. Elements of Silicon Valley and tech-will-save-us fanaticism seem very cult-like to me, and I tried to bring that in. Cults use things called “thought-terminating clichés,” those catchy sayings that mean nothing but shut down dissent because there’s no way to reply. I tried to have fun with coming up with some of those. Cults often seek out people with few family members. Many do follow restrictive diets, supposedly for spiritualty, but hungry people don’t think straight, right? Many use drugs as a way to influence decision-making and lower inhibition in prospective members. All of the manipulation in the book is drawn from tactics real cults engage in.

Every character that Tansy interacts with wants something from her, whether that’s her husband Guy, the leader of the Bohemian Club, Father M, or M’s wife, Mia, and usually they want her to be one thing: submissive. Tansy struggles to maintain and keep any kind of power that she can. Did power—power dynamics, lack of power, etc.—inform much of your writing? Does it still?

That’s such a smart observation. I think it’s impossible to be a woman and not understand that power dynamics and lack of power influence even the smallest actions you take: Which side of the street will I walk on? Which subway car should I get in? What information is safe to share with this person vs. that person? Can I park under a streetlight instead of in a garage? Did I not get that job because I didn’t look a certain way, or because I looked too much a certain way?

Especially growing up in the South, I think, it was really emphasized to me that I could not do things because I was a girl. In the 1990s, I had a relative tell me I couldn’t be a doctor, I could be a nurse instead, but my brothers could be doctors. That never leaves you. Tansy is told constantly, like most women I’m sure, that things would go better for her if she just gave up part of herself, different parts for each of these people or groups, but add them all up, and what is left of herself that is hers? And when she does give up these things that are asked of her, her experience may seem like it improves at first, but ultimately, the underlying problems are still there. She has given up her sense of self for what?

Bellinas feels like a place you can actually go to (not that you’d want to, I think), with an interesting history, mood, folklore, etc. How do place and setting influence you and your writing?

For years after college, I worked at a travel bookstore, and I had dreams of being a travel writer like Jan Morris or Pico Iyer, which may not be a profession anymore, sadly, but I have come to see all writing as a kind of travel writing, whether you’re visiting a place or a place in time or a specific time with a character. I think of my books, Low Country and The Witches of Bellinas, as being very place-specific and influenced by travel writing for sure. Low Country is revisiting a physical place, but also a place in time that doesn’t exist anymore. In Bellinas, the place functions as another character: What is it saying? What do signs in the land, the sky, the ocean mean? Bellinas is talking to Tansy, just as any other character is.

Who or what are some of your influences? What got you into writing overall? Is there something that influences you that nobody would expect?

I am a big rereader. Edith Wharton, Maxine Hong Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Nabokov (there’s a big Pale Fire reference in this book), Barry Hannah. Shirley Jackson. In my 20s, I fell head over heels in love with Salman Rushdie’s writing after reading Midnight’s Children. I bought my first copy at a thrift store after college, and when I couldn’t afford new books, I just reread it over and over. The storytelling voice reminded me a lot of Southern storytellers in my family. I always loved reading, but trying to capture my family stories and those voices got me writing—when I worked at the travel bookstore, actually, I started writing those on our store bookmarks and frequent-purchase cards between customers.

After my uneasy, anxiety-ridden summer in the coastal town when I was mourning the loss of my manuscript, I was so unmoored and lost, and reading—rereading favorites especially—was the only thing that helped me feel like myself again, that quieted that sense of dread I had. I was really drawn to rereading scary books, like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Tansy is named for the elder sister in that book. And The Haunting of Hill House, of course. I owe so much to that book in terms of figuring out how to write about anxiety and fantasy and a woman unraveling, after being so hopeful. I read and watched Rosemary’s Baby. Tansy’s husband is named for the husband in Rosemary’s Baby. María Luisa Bombal’s House of Mist was one that influenced me a lot. It oddly made me feel less nervous about my unnerving environment, having a specific unsettling book to focus on.

In trying to write something a little bit suspenseful for the first time, I thought a lot about television shows: Mad Men, The Sopranos, Freaks & Geeks. In terms of unexpected influences . . . I really admire a lot of comedians. I will labor over comedians’ sentence structures for punchlines. I love puzzling those out, but there’s no formula, and it just feels like magic. Garry Shandling is great for that. And Tina Fey.

Who/what are you reading/enjoying right now?

I was lucky enough to get a galley of Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg, and I can’t wait for everyone else to read it. I will probably start Kelly Link’s The Book of Love next. I’m a little nervous, though—I know I’m going to love it, and once I start, I’ll never get to read it for the first time again. I just started watching Northern Exposure and cannot stop. I just love it. Small town weirdness that is gentle and supportive, with a dash of good magic. I would belong to that community. Maybe.

Do you have anything coming up that you’d like to talk about? What’s next after Bellinas?

I am not sure what’s next. I have had a few short stories published over the last year, which is exciting, so hopefully more of that. I maybe have a longer thing brewing, but I am a little superstitious about sharing too early.