How the Day of the Dead Gave Life to My Novel: Guest Post & Giveaway with Olivia Boler

Thank you so much to Melissa for asking me to participate in this fun event! I absolutely love Halloween, and not just because of the candy and costumes—although they are a big part. It’s a part of my favorite season, autumn, which in San Francisco is rather mild and sometimes downright warm. Still, the winds pick up, the light starts to change as the days get shorter, and there’s that sense of beginning and ending—the beginning of the holidays and the ending of a year.

When I was studying Wiccan culture before writing my novel, The Flower Bowl Spell, I learned why Halloween is so important to witches. Samhain is basically a new year’s celebration, and as we know, mainstream New Year’s Eve is big-time huge. Fireworks, noisemakers, and champagne flow as midnight strikes. I’m Chinese on my mother’s side, and Lunar New Year is just as important in our culture. Because it’s based on the moon’s phases, the date changes, but any time from mid-January to mid-February each year, my family gathers at a Chinese restaurant for a banquet feast. We wear red clothes that are preferably new, and we eat ourselves silly. Then the firecrackers begin. So finding out that Halloween/Samhain is a big deal was no surprise.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to attend a Samhain feast. I didn’t know anyone there, but everyone was very welcoming. There were kids running around, music playing, and Day of the Dead statuary throughout the courtyard where the party took place. It’s there I got the inspiration for my novel’s heroine, Memphis Zhang. I saw a woman of Asian descent feeding a little boy. She and I were the only Asian Americans at the party, as far as I know, and since I’ve always been fascinated by race and culture, my mind hooked on this seemingly small detail. Was she a Wiccan, or was she just a curious observer, like me? If she was a witch, what was it like to be a part of this religion with Celtic roots? What did her family think about it, or were they a part of it too? I began jotting down notes, and before I knew it, I was fleshing out the character of Memphis, who, by the way, is named for the ancient (and some think magical) city in Egypt and not the town in Tennessee. 

Title:  The Flower Bowl Spell
Author:  Olivia Boler

Reading Level:  Adult
Genre: Paranormal 

Release Date: January 25th 2012

Size:  245 pages

Find the book: Goodreads  | Amazon  | Barnes & Noble  | Smashwords

Journalist Memphis Zhang isn’t ashamed of her Wiccan upbringing—in fact, she’s proud to be one of a few Chinese American witches in San Francisco, and maybe the world. Unlike the well-meaning but basically powerless Wiccans in her disbanded coven, Memphis can see fairies, read auras, and cast spells that actually work—even though she concocts them with ingredients like Nutella and antiperspirant. Yet after a friend she tries to protect is brutally killed, Memphis, full of guilt, abandons magick to lead a “normal” life. 

The appearance, however, of her dead friend’s attractive rock star brother—as well as a fairy in a subway tunnel—suggest that magick is not done with her. Reluctantly, Memphis finds herself dragged back into the world of urban magick, trying to stop a power-hungry witch from using the dangerous Flower Bowl Spell and killing the people Memphis loves—and maybe even Memphis herself.

The first time the veil lifted I was eight and very bored.

When I was a kid, my parents often left me in the care of Auntie Tess. Since she was a practicing Wiccan of the hippy-dippy variety, the kind that gives San Francisco its reputation for benign lunacy, they knew I’d be safe. I don’t remember a time when we weren’t together in someone’s backyard or a public space celebrating Sabbats major and minor. For these ladies—and sometimes gents—practicing magick was like prayer. Or wishful thinking. They’d do their rituals, but nothing supernatural actually ever happened—except, on occasion, the green light from the candles, which not everyone could actually see. They didn’t seem to expect real magick. They just liked to come together. Like a book club.

On the night in question, we’d gone to Golden Gate Park’s Lindley Meadow. In the daytime, it was the domain of dogs, acrobats, guitarists, and Frisbee freaks. I liked to visit the horses in the nearby stables or watch the model-boaters cutting loose on Spreckels Lake.

But after the sun went down, the meadow was a favorite ritual site for Wiccans and pagans. It’s resplendent with tiny daisy-chain daisies. The other coven kids and I would collect them, their petals tightly closed for the night, while our mothers and caretakers prepped for the forthcoming hocus-pocus.

The priestesses would get there before everyone else to set up, lighting candles, arranging the talismans, laying out white ropes in a near perfect circle. They were dressed in their robes, mostly handmade get-ups of maroon velvet or navy blue velour. When everything was just so, they called the kids over. As the laughter and murmuring died down, we all joined hands and, without preamble, began to sway and hum. The women closed their eyes. In unison, they sang a song that was some variation of this:

Through all the world below

She is seen all around

Search hills and valley through

There she is found

The growing of the corn

The lily and the thorn

The pleasant and forlorn

All declare

She is there

In meadow dressed in green

She is seen.

La la la. Hills and valleys we have in San Francisco, but growing corn? A few public garden plots here and there, I’m sure, but even as a child I knew fantasy from reality. We were urban witches longing for a landscape that belonged to Wine Country fifty miles away. Or to a time three hundred years past.

On and on they sang, in harmony buffered by the fog. That night was extra-special—in the center of the circle next to the usual beeswax candles, someone had placed skeleton dolls dressed in bright clothing.

Auntie Tess was the smallest woman there (easy to pick out in the crowd if you set your gaze lower than usual) and the only Asian face among the others (not including yours truly), which were predominantly white. There was a black woman from Cuba too, but that’s as far as our coven’s diversity diversified.

As I mentioned, I was bored. Bored with making daisy chains, bored with the other coven kids, bored with Tess. I leaned against her, her dark silk kimono slippery and cool under my cheek. She had sewn it shut so that she could slide it over her head.

“Auntie Tess,” I whispered.

“Shhh.” She opened one eye, which glinted down at me.

“I want to be Dorothy for Halloween.” Wizard of Oz Dorothy, of course. “When are we getting my costume?”

“Tomorrow, Memphis, I promise. Now sing or be quiet.”

I watched the other women. Some smiled through their song, earnest and blissed-out. Some undulated. Others mouthed the words, but not Tess. With my ear pressed to her side, I could feel her strong voice, her heartbeat, the gurgling of her supper digesting. I pressed harder until she stumbled a little, and got a frown for my hug.

In the center of the circle, the candles in their hurricane lanterns and jelly jars burned, illuminating a bouquet of flowers. The shadows flowed over the dolls, which made it seem like they were dancing and grinning. I blinked and peered closer and realized that they actually were dancing, all on their own. One tossed off his sombrero and led the others in a Mexican hat dance. Faintly, I could make out their voices, a discordant cheering through the women’s singing. You might expect them to sound like cartoon chipmunks, but their voices, though faint, sounded quite robust.

As they cha-cha’ed by, they saluted me. And I saluted back. I tugged on Tess’s brocade sleeve.

The thing is, I realized in the instant she turned to look down at me that it was hopeless. Her face was full of annoyance, and there was an absence of something I couldn’t name at the time, but I thought of it as a light. She was missing the light that makes magick visible.  

Olivia Boler is the author of two novels, YEAR OF THE SMOKE GIRL and THE FLOWER BOWL SPELL. Poet Gary Snyder described SMOKE GIRL as a "dense weave in the cross-cultural multi-racial world of complex, educated hip contemporary coast-to-coast America...It is a fine first novel, rich in paradox and detail."

A freelance writer who received her master's degree in creative writing from UC Davis, Boler has published short stories in the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) anthology Cheers to Muses, the literary journal MARY, and The Lyon Review, among others. She lives in San Francisco with her family. 

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