“I was told many years ago by my grandmother who raised me: If somebody puts you on a road and you don’t feel comfortable on it and you look ahead and you don’t like the destination and you look behind and you don’t want to return to that place, step off the road.” — Maya Angelou
Ellen Morris Prewitt charted a non-traditional path to publication. Though she has long enjoyed the art of storytelling, Prewitt practiced law for 19 years before she eventually set her sights on writing as a profession.
Her unorthodox entry to the world of professional storytelling has not hampered her, though. In 2009, she won Memphis Magazine’s fiction-writing contest, and she has had stories nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, including one that received Special Mention in 2007. She has won other awards, as well, including the Tennessee Writers Alliance Fiction Contest.
In addition to an impressive array of awards and honorable mentions, Prewitt’s stories have been published in Fourth Genre, storySouth, Porchlight, Southern Women’s Review, the Mississippi Free Press, The Pinch, the University of Memphis’ literary journal, as well as other publications, most of them with a clear bent for literary Southern fiction. Her award-winning short-story collection Cain’t Do Nothing With Love was published in 2014.
When she is not in Memphis, Prewitt and her husband split time between New Orleans and her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, giving her a deeply rooted understanding of the South and all its intricacies. That knowledge permeates her fiction, imbuing it with a deep sense of the place that forms the backdrop of her stories.
Prewitt’s voice is warm, with a pleasant Southern lilt, and she laughs often, hinting at the thread of humor running through her work, glittering like a rich vein of gold among quartz.
Telling Tales
Prewitt spent her early years in Jackson, but her family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, after her mother remarried. The family spent many summer vacations and Christmas breaks making the drive back and forth between the two cities to visit family, and Prewitt drew on her imagination to entertain herself.
“When we would make these long trips, I would look out the window and tell stories to this captive audience that I had about anything that was passing by. It was like, ‘Let me tell you about the people who live in this house,’” she says. The image comes to mind of a young Prewitt delightedly spilling the dirt on the imaginary lives of people glimpsed out the window of a moving car.
Eventually, her penchant for storytelling drew a response. Prewitt remembers her mother, who “didn’t give out compliments easily,” telling one of Prewitt’s aunts, “This child can tell a story about anything.”
As Prewitt tells it, her mother stopped in her tracks, pointed to a dead fish lying on the sand of the beach, and set her daughter a challenge.
“She said, ‘Tell a story about that fish,’” Prewitt remembers with a side-splitting laugh.
It should come as no surprise that Prewitt met her mother’s challenge with determination — and a story about a fish she had never before seen or given a thought.
Her goal as a teller of tales has always been to amuse. Prewitt rarely used her talent for off-the-cuff storytelling for nefarious ends, though she did once invent a more exciting profession for her father. She says that as a child, she had a poor grasp of what her dad actually did, so she said, “He works for the mafia.”
Her father was a wholesale grocer.
When Prewitt told the “fish story” to one of her beta readers, the reader responded, “That reveals a lot about When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women.”
Murderous Time-Traveling Women
“When I fled Mississippi, I ran to New Orleans because the city had spent the last few years same as me — rocking a romanticized past until a giant storm rolled in and blew the myth to hell, leaving a shaky grip on the future,” the novel’s protagonist, Aurora Etoile, says of her recent past.
Aurora is forced to flee Mississippi after killing her boss (there are reasons, of course), and the story snowballs from that sedate stare. She inadvertently opens a temporal portal of some kind when, lost in the Bywater, she recites a little ditty to help keep track of the order in the streets in New Orleans.
“I gave her my terrible sense of direction,” Prewitt admits with a laugh.
Aurora’s seemingly magical poem transports a saint, a prince, and her three ancestral grandmothers, the titular murderous time-traveling women, to twenty-first-century Louisiana.
Though the author’s new novel is, technically, a fantasy, Prewitt prefers the terms “speculative fiction” and “magical realism,” noting that her novel is missing many of the hallmarks of high fantasy. There are no werewolves, elves, or knights in armor bravely carrying pennants snapping in the wind.
“I took little truths from my grandmothers and blew them up into fiction, but my grandmothers were not murderers. That I know of. I just want to make that clear,” Prewitt says with one of her trademark chuckles.
Many Southern women become the de facto keepers of the family lore. That sense of the partially obscured past making itself known in the present is a hallmark of so much Southern storytelling, from Southern gothic to When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women. Memory and myth, history and trauma — those are hallmarks of Southern fiction, and Prewitt deftly pairs those motifs with the complementary genre trope of time-travel.
“The past defines the present,” Prewitt says. “The past is the very thing that these women have to figure out a way to deal with.”
Though the author’s new novel is, technically, a fantasy, Prewitt prefers the terms “speculative fiction” and “magical realism,” noting that her novel is missing many of the hallmarks of high fantasy. There are no werewolves, elves, or knights in armor bravely carrying pennants snapping in the wind.
“It falls into a genre that they call traumedy,” Prewitt says. The word is a kenning of trauma and comedy, and it succinctly sums up the blend of humor and painful history that characterize Prewitt’s work.
The Path to Publication
In something of a full-circle moment, Prewitt’s first-ever short-story submission was to Memphis Magazine for its fiction-writing contest. “I got an honorable mention and a $500 check, and I thought, ‘This writing business is going to be a piece of cake.’ But no,” she says with a laugh, seemingly delighted at the challenge that “this writing business” has presented her. Of course, challenges met are more easily remembered with a laugh.
Prewitt eventually did go on to win the magazine’s fiction-writing contest in 2009, for a story she called “Just Now.”
Early in her writing career, she wrote radio commentaries for WKNO. As with her other public-facing work, a thread of humor runs through her output. Prewitt worked on her own projects as well, both long-form novels and short stories.
“You have to do what works for you. There are all different ways to get to someplace.” — Ellen Morris Prewitt
Determined to publish a novel, Prewitt wrote three manuscripts in three different genres, and sent them to three different agents, who eventually failed to sell them. “They died on submission, which is an awfully graphic way to put it,” Prewitt says, and for once, there’s a hint of disappointment coloring her voice.
Unwilling to concede defeat, she decided to fall back on her childhood storytelling roots. When she began her next manuscript, she had one goal only: to entertain herself. Prewitt diligently plugged away at her manuscript, until she had finished enough to stick it in a drawer. It’s a piece of relatively conventional writing advice — to set a finished work aside until the writer can gain a healthy dose of perspective on it. Unfortunately, there the manuscript languished, until a forgotten assignment recalled it to her mind.
At the time, Prewitt was part of a writing group. The group would give each other prompts at each meeting and would bring back their responses the next month.
“I hadn’t done my homework,” Prewitt remembers. “That first chapter, maybe I could slide that in there and say it was my homework.”
The response from her compatriots was glowing, so she picked the manuscript back up and determined to put in the absolutely Herculean amount of work to shepherd it through revisions and to publication.
Determined to take a different route to publication than her previous attempts, Prewitt found a home for When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women with small press Literary Wanderlust, an imprint out of Denver, Colorado. In the end, her whirlwind tale has found its right place, even as Aurora, the novel’s protagonist, has had to cross geographic and temporal barriers (not to mention enlisting the help of her ancestors) to find her place in the world.
“You have to do what works for you,” Prewitt says. “There are all different ways to get to someplace.”
