Willowshade, Ohio might be fictional, but its roots are buried deep in a real place that shaped me: Tomah, Wisconsin.

Back in 2020, when the world shut down and we were all trying to make sense of a new kind of stillness, I was stationed in Tomah during quarantine. I had never lived in a town that small before. I was used to more noise, more movement, more… everything. But in Tomah, things slowed. The silence stretched in every direction. There was space to breathe—and space to feel everything I’d been pushing aside.

At first, the quiet was uncomfortable. Then it became something else entirely. It began to haunt me, and eventually, it inspired me.

That’s where Willowshade was born.

Willowshade has the charming façade of any quaint Midwestern town. There’s a coffee shop where the cafecito hits just right (Espresso Enchantment), a too-quiet library where spirits may or may not help shelve books, it smells like old pages, and neighbors who know your business before you even speak it aloud. But underneath all that, the land breathes. The wind whistles through hollowed-out trees like it’s carrying secrets. The town itself seems to remember—and sometimes, it answers back.

Tomah didn’t have a haunted hill like Willowshade’s Hallowthorn, but it did have its own kind of eeriness. The kind you feel in your bones during the long fall and endless winter. The kind of cold that cuts through coats and creeps into your chest. I lived near a lake, and when the sun didn’t come out for days at a time, the isolation wrapped around you like fog. Beautiful. Frigid. And honestly? A little miserable.

That’s why The Ordinary Bruja couldn’t be set anywhere else—at least not in my mind. I wanted to bottle that sense of emotional weather: the kind where your environment matches the ache inside you.

Marisol Espinal, my main character, left Willowshade once for college to run away from it all. But then she had to come back defeated, not having accomplished anything of the things she had told herself she would do. Willowshade it’s all she’s ever known. That makes her different from me—I was a visitor, an outsider looking in. But Marisol? She’s embedded in the town’s soil. She walks its streets every day, but she’s never truly felt like she belongs.

And that’s the core of the story.

I wanted to write about a girl who is from a place but doesn’t fit in it. A girl who sees the same faces everywhere she goes, who’s haunted not just by ghosts and spirits, but by her own sense of inadequacy. When you grow up in a small town where everyone knows you—but doesn’t see you—it can feel suffocating. Like no matter how far you try to stretch, the town pulls you back in.

And if that town is keeping secrets? Even worse.

Willowshade isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a character. It listens. It remembers. It tests the people who try to ignore its pull. It clings to Marisol in the same way fear does—tight, familiar, but hard to shake. And like fear, it forces her to confront the things she’d rather keep buried: ancestral pain, repressed magic, and the quiet suspicion that maybe she’s not as ordinary as she’s tried to believe.

Every detail in Willowshade was chosen with intention—from the way the trees seem to lean too far, to the feeling that the hill is watching, to the slight hum in the soil beneath Marisol’s feet. And yes, the town’s Dominican roots—woven into the fabric through Marisol’s family, her altar, her language—are part of the magic too.

Tomah gave me the raw material. It reminded me what it felt like to be uncomfortable in my skin, to wrestle with stillness, to listen to what surfaces in the quiet. Willowshade allowed me to fictionalize that discomfort and give it a pulse. A place. A haunted hill and a history.

In many ways, Willowshade is a love letter to that strange time in my life. It’s about stillness and suffocation. Belonging and unbelonging. It’s about the girls who have to come back. The ones who are told to shrink, to disappear, to deny the parts of themselves that shine too bright or speak too loudly.

But Willowshade doesn’t let you stay small forever.

It cracks open. It reveals. It demands that you remember who you are—even if that remembering hurts.

So if you’ve ever lived in a town that felt too small for your dreams… if you’ve ever felt like a stranger in your own home… if you’ve ever carried inherited pain you couldn’t name… then welcome. Willowshade has been waiting for you.

And yes, it does whisper back.