When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women — yes, that's the full title, and yes, it earns every word — is the kind of book that defies easy categorization. Part speculative fiction, part family history, part love letter to the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, it grew out of a simple but irresistible question Prewitt asked herself one day about her three ancestral grandmothers. The title alone tends to stop people cold. "People just love the title," Prewitt laughs. "It's like, let me say that again. And I think you can tell from the title, it's not going to be staid."

Three Women, Three Worlds, One Wild Idea

Those grandmothers lived in the mid-1800s in three very different corners of Mississippi: one in a fine house in downtown Jackson, one a published writer in Vicksburg, and one a pioneer woman with Native American ancestry in the scrublands of southwest Mississippi. "How different these three women were," Prewitt recalls thinking. "And what if they had met?"

That spark became the novel's engine. Prewitt, who lived in the Bywater at the time of writing, wove her grandmothers' spirits into the story as ancestral familiars guiding the main character, Etoile, on a quest involving the last dauphin of France, an assassin, and the streets of New Orleans she'd memorized through her own made-up mnemonic chant. That chant, in fact, became the novel's very first sentence.

The result is something even Prewitt's cousin couldn't quite categorize. "He asked me how much of this is true," she laughs. "I said, you will read this book and you will know none of it is true." What is true is the geography. Prewitt drew on her own grandmothers' houses in Jackson to give Etoile's childhood its physical shape and the emotional core. Etoile is raised by her three grandmothers after her parents are unable to care for her, and her journey through New Orleans becomes a way of reckoning with what has been passed down to her, for better and worse.

Writing the Book She Needed to Write

Prewitt's path to publication is its own kind of story. She's had three agents over the years, for three different manuscripts in three different genres. When she sat down to write this novel in 2018, she wasn't thinking about publication at all. "I wrote it for myself," she says. "I just had this spark of an idea that tickled me." The manuscript sat in a drawer for years until she slipped the first chapter into her writing group as a last-minute homework substitute. One of the group members stopped her after she finished reading: "That is a perfect first chapter." That was the nudge she needed. Rather than chase another agent, Prewitt went directly to small presses and found her match with a publisher in Denver whose editor happened to be from Alabama. Her advice to other writers? Write for yourself first, stay inside a community, and know that the rules exist to be understood, and sometimes broken.