In the small town of Blackclaw Valley, tourists flock to experience picturesque hiking trails and the historic family-owned shops to add some cozy charm and a little bit of magic to their lives. When that magic gets threatened and tourists start spotting wolves in the Hemwood forests, Sage, a young witch learning to brew potions for her family’s apothecary, and her ex-best friend and crush Ximena, try to put old heartbreak aside to figure out what’s going on. Will they be able to save their special Pacific Northwest town as well as a possible second chance for their relationship? Those questions and more can be answered in the new YA cozy mystery romance Brewed with Love by author Shelly Page. I sat down with Shelly to talk about second chances, her work as an attorney for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, and the real life inspiration for the magic of the residents of Blackclaw Valley. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

Where did the idea for Brewed with Love come from?

Brewed with Love came to me first from the setting. My mom was living in a small town in the middle of California by the coast. There’s a lot of Redwoods in the area. I just thought to myself, this was such a cool place, such a cool setting. I love the small town vibe and how everybody knew each other and that was definitely the inspiration for Blackclaw Valley. I was thinking, what could it be like if a teen lived here and loved this town and the people in it. Brewed with Love is a romance and I’m honestly really into second chance romances, so that was a no-brainer for me. I love the idea of having a reconnection. And because the setting is so important in the story and fuels the story, I knew I wanted it to have something to do with the town and something to do with the people in the town as the reason that there has to be a second chance for this romance. Everything pulls from this small town.

When we think of small town stories we often think of Stars Hollow or other Northeastern towns. So, to have it set in the Pacific Northwest where you have the ocean and you have the scent of pine mingling with the salt water, there’s a similar cozy vibe but it’s very different. It’s a bit more open and adventurous and definitely magical. In the way we think about the forest as magical, it evokes stories of fairies and it’s lovely.

Visiting the Redwoods it feels like that too. Very majestic and magical.

This theme of reconnection and the second chance loves as we’re living in such times that feel so divisive and it’s like people don’t know how to speak to each other, let alone reconcile and repair after a miscommunication. In some ways, these kids seem like they have relationships more together than most adults I know.

Right! [Laughs]

Do you have a favorite character?

Yeah, absolutely! A few of the side characters are some of my favorites. I love Nana and Tiva. I love their relationship. Honestly, this book was a different genre before it sold to my publisher. It was a thriller and I had an R&R (revise and resubmit) for more of a cozy mystery and romance. I did my best to keep a lot of the same elements that were in the original story and that includes a lot of the history of the town. It’s real history in California, a lot about the Natives there living on the land, which is Tiva’s character. A lot of settlers coming in because of the Gold Rush and migration. That idea of greediness was central and that just goes with the history of the town. I was a history major in college so, I’m very interested in the history of places and communities. Anyway, Tiva is one of my favorite characters because I think she’s the most authentic to the town and the area. She also has great advice and is very funny. Nana reminds me of my own grandma in terms of that tough love. You can’t get anything past her, she knows what’s going on but is letting you get in your own experiences. Which is funny because Nana definitely knows something is going on with Sage and Ximena and is like, pushing them to reconcile. A lot of characters do that throughout the story, they give them a bit of nudging. Which I think teens need especially in terms of reconciling.

Do you have a favorite character?

Yeah, absolutely! A few of the side characters are some of my favorites. I love Nana and Tiva. I love their relationship. Honestly, this book was a different genre before it sold to my publisher. It was a thriller and I had an R&R (revise and resubmit) for more of a cozy mystery and romance. I did my best to keep a lot of the same elements that were in the original story and that includes a lot of the history of the town. It’s real history in California, a lot about the Natives there living on the land, which is Tiva’s character. A lot of settlers coming in because of the Gold Rush and migration. That idea of greediness was central and that just goes with the history of the town. I was a history major in college so, I’m very interested in the history of places and communities. Anyway, Tiva is one of my favorite characters because I think she’s the most authentic to the town and the area. She also has great advice and is very funny. Nana reminds me of my own grandma in terms of that tough love. You can’t get anything past her, she knows what’s going on but is letting you get in your own experiences. Which is funny because Nana definitely knows something is going on with Sage and Ximena and is like, pushing them to reconcile. A lot of characters do that throughout the story, they give them a bit of nudging. Which I think teens need especially in terms of reconciling.

Learning how to relationship.

Yeah, yeah. Those are my two favorite characters, for sure. I also like Mercer (Sage’s current BFF). I feel like she’s hilarious. She’s like that best friend that everybody really wants that is also trying to get Sage out of her comfort zone.

All the characters were so distinct but they blended so well together. And even if we didn’t get all the details of why certain relationships fell apart it still felt like you [the reader] was right there in it with them and on their side to get things to work out and save the town. And there was still that thriller vibe with the whole “we need to figure this out” [detective-ing].

My favorite thing about YA is that you can write characters that are like, I’ll just fix it.

Right! Because they have no experience yet telling them like, oh no maybe this won’t work actually.

I love a character that’s just so optimistic that they are going to be able to save the town. Then they do because it’s a cozy romance!

I also read in your bio that you are a lawyer. How does your work as a lawyer influence your work as a writer? Or are these two separate parts of yourself that are expressed in their own ways?

I would say I’ve been a writer longer than I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been writing since I was thirteen. Always really interested in writing, reading, and history. When I set out to pursue writing professionally, that was something that was completely separate from my law career. I also always wanted to be a lawyer. I feel like it was 2019, when I was like, I really want to pursue writing seriously but I also love being a lawyer so I don’t want to give that up. The way that it [writing] started to be influenced by my job as a lawyer comes in the way that I create characters. I work at a nonprofit, the LGBT Center, and I work with homeless LGBT youth. All of my clients are either BIPOC or queer or both and that is the audience that I am writing for. My clients are all eighteen to twenty-four, they are youth, that’s what we classify them as. They give me a lot of inspiration in terms of what kinds of diversity I want to see in my stories and write about. I love that I’m able to write stories because I can write them about Black queer girls or Mexican queer girls, the kind of clients I see every day. They want to see themselves in stories and in media. I think they have been so used to just seeing an archetype of a “queer person” in media and that’s just not what I see on a daily basis and that’s not what they see on a daily basis. It’s really important for me that I try and have as diverse a cast of characters as I can while also being as authentic as possible. That way, at least for me, I am giving back to my community in a sense of like, I can provide a different perspective for everybody that’s reading since I’m not only writing for queer kids of color, but I do want them to be able to see themselves in my stories.

It reminds me of the Schitt’s Creek way of portraying queer love [and existence by] writing it as if it’s just normal and not shrouded in trauma. Obviously, that’s still there because that’s part of the human condition but the pushing of the normalcy narrative of it and of worlds we want to see and we want to live in and know that it can be like that. And I definitely got that from reading [Brewed with Love] as well.

Oh good! I feel like I might have overdone it but I wanted to make sure that I covered as many people as I could.

And also, magic as an analogy for how we discriminate against other people or play down our own gifts is so rich. I thought it was utilized really beautifully in the book. If you could have a magical power what would you like to have?

I’ll stick to [magic from] the book. I really enjoyed the cloning capabilities! Fun fact: all of the magic in the book is derived from properties of Redwood trees. Redwoods have the ability to clone themselves. As they reproduce they will form this fairy ring and the mother tree, as she propagates, will make more clones of herself. So, all these trees are basically identical and I think that’s super cool. I would love to be able to have multiple clones of myself just doing different things. That way I could get everything done. Like, creating tonics and stuff sounds cool, but at this point in my life I need more hands.

That’s amazing that you drew your magic inspiration from literal trees and what they already do.

One of the other coven members never gets hurt and can create new limbs and things like that, which is also something trees can do. If one of their branches gets cut off they just grow another branch. But I don’t need that. I’m not getting into situations where I need to regrow a limb. But, yeah, there’s a lot of little nuggets in the book I had the funnest time making.

Now I’m wondering about Mercer’s (Sage’s BFF) gift and how she can sense objects and what’s happened in time with that object.

So, she can read histories of objects, similar to how trees have their histories within their tree rings so you can tell how old a tree is. And trees keep memories, which is really cool and are very aware of their surroundings. If they are growing in a forest they will purposely make sure the tops of their branches don’t tangle with the other trees around them. So, they’re very aware of personal space and time. I just thought that if a tree was like a person, how could we show that they keep memories and that they know what’s happening around them? And how do we show that it can go back through histories? So, that’s how I thought of it as a practical gift and something that is helpful for an investigation [while] also staying true to the Redwoods.

It also makes me think of how trees communicate with each other through their root systems and I think of the coven as that root system. This is how they stay together, give information to each other, work together, etc.

It’s the community and the forest is a community as a collection of trees.

You mentioned you studied history and historical communities, do you have a favorite community that you have studied other than trees?

I don’t know if I have a favorite. I will say I do have a favorite time period. I really like 20^th Century US history. That was my focus in college. Part of the reason I enjoy that period of time is that so much happened. There were a lot of different movements: the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, and there’s a lot of change happening very quickly. [This] affected individual communities and it also affected everybody in the US. That is something that I think about a lot because we are also going through a period of a lot of change. It’s interesting because some things that happened in the 20^th Century are still affecting us to this day or are being overturned by our Supreme Court. I think knowing history is super important because a lot of change happened so fast during that century, we are seeing some of the fallout from that but also getting a lot of benefit from it. As a Black woman, my day-to-day life is affected by what has happened prior to me being alive. So, that is my favorite time period. It’s a long time, it’s a century, but it’s good in terms of civil and human rights.

As we’re still dealing with the ramifications of the turn of the century and figuring out how to maintain and expand on the positive things that happened during that time, where do you see or where do you want your books to fall into that for people?

I think the positive outlook on life is something that I try to do. I want the takeaway to be a sense of success, achievement, and community, which are themes prevalent in Brewed with Love. Definitely community and supporting small businesses, family-owned businesses, and making sure that what you start can continue on. That is a theme I try to maintain and I think we could use today. Trying to continue, like you were saying, these achievements we had in the previous century. I know it seems hard to do some days. Also [in regards to Brewed with Love and future books]  a sense of community, and queerness, and of finding love in unlikely places. I think love is something that our society is particularly lacking at this moment. So, empathy and understanding of other people, that would be great.

Is there anything else you want the GeeksOUT audience to know or take away?

What I want readers to take away from Brewed is that, it is a romance and a cozy mystery, but there are so many deeper themes that I tried to touch upon that I can only get so far in with the limited space of a book. If you’re queer and you’re reading the book, there is space for you in there that I hope you find a lot of comfort in. And to value your community and to find love in some of these unlikely spaces. Maybe even give someone a little grace. Not necessarily a second chance, but a little grace goes a long way. That’s the takeaway I would like people to have.

Brewed with Love will be published in January 2025 and is available for pre-order here. For more on Shelly Page head to her website www.shellypage.com.