The RV Book Fair 2026: Interview with S.A. Sizemore

Your journey began in theater before expanding into themed entertainment and now fiction. How have those creative experiences shaped the way you tell stories?

Having a theater background gives me such a strong basis for plot and dialogue and capturing an audience’s imagination into a story. What I write is very visual. Themed entertainment is rooted in storytelling. It’s at the heart of it and is another format that immerses you in world building. Having a background in both theater and themed entertainment world building was the perfect combination for me to propel into novel writing. If I’m doing it right, you should feel completely enveloped into the world I’m creating for you in the Beckett Coven series.

Your debut novel, "Whispers of the Pale Witch," is inspired in part by your ancestral connection to the Salem Witch Trials. What first sparked the idea for this series?

My father’s side of the family is mixed European and Native American decent. My grandmother was constantly telling us stories about our ancestors, so when I learned about my Salem ancestors, it of course only made sense for me to start telling their story. We first see it through the modern lens of their descendants, but as we go further into the book series you’ll get to experience more of their story firsthand. My Salem ancestors are so fascinating and infuriatingly complicated. You get a taste of them in the first book from the distant lens of history, but as we go further along in the series their stories will become more front and center.

Salem is almost a character in its own right in your novel. What drew you to this fascinating setting, and what kind of research did you do to bring it to life?

I first visited Salem as a teenager, decades before I discovered my ancestry. Out of all the places we visited on that trip, images from Salem seared into my mind the most. Once I decided I was going to set this book series there, I knew I had to do two things: read as much as I could about the Salem Witch Trials, in particular the trial transcripts, and learn the history of Salem and my family, but I also needed to go to Salem again as an adult. The first trip was in 2019 right after I found out about my ancestors. I spent hours wandering around and taking photos of all the textures and listening to the folks who live there. I went back again in 2025 and amazingly found even more things I hadn’t discovered. I also spent an hour or two every evening hanging outside the graveyards where my ancestors are buried. That really helped set a mood! I’m going back again the first weekend in August this summer. Can’t get enough of Salem.

Your protagonist, Kylie Beckett, returns home to uncover long-buried family secrets. What makes her the perfect guide for readers entering the Beckett Coven world?

Kylie’s young and curious. She doesn’t know much about Salem or her family and ancestors, so we get to learn about all these things with her. We also get to learn about witchcraft as she learns about it. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to start the series almost as if we are going backwards. It gives us a grounding space to experience this story in our modern world with a young person who still has much to learn. By the time the series is done, Kylie is going to go through this incredible character arc. We get to see her change and grow and hopefully the reader gets to change and grow along with her after reading the series.

Without giving away spoilers, who—or what—is the Pale Witch, and why do you think readers are so captivated by legends surrounding witches?

Oooo. This one is hard. I’m going to be very careful answering it. The Pale Witch is part myth and part truth. She was given her name by a Boston newspaper many decades ago after a horribly gruesome murder in Salem. The police found her walking the snow-covered streets stark naked with a witch’s athame dripping blood into the snow. The myth of her grew after that night. Was she a monster or something else? Sometimes people are scarier than monsters by the choices they make or by what they can’t control. Witches are captivating because they are women with power. Sometimes that power is depicted as supernatural. Sometimes it’s as simple as a regular human being protecting someone who’s vulnerable. For the most part the witches in the Beckett Coven series don’t have what I would call supernatural powers. No one is flying or dropping a house on anyone. Each one of them has a gift and when they bring those gifts together and work as a family unit, or coven, that’s when the real magic begins.

With Book Two already planned, how far ahead have you mapped the Beckett Coven trilogy, and do your characters ever surprise you along the way?

Book Two, which is called, Lies of the Bishop Stone, and Book Three are written. I just finished the first draft of the third one. Now I have to add in some notes and smooth out a few things in Book Two, so I don’t have any plot holes. The three books are linear, meaning the next one picks up right where the last one left off. This sounds confusing right, since I also just said we’ll be going back in time, and we will. You’ll just have to see how that plays out. It’s going to be a trip. This will be a three-book series…for now. My characters become their own little beings. Sometimes they totally surprise me. Finlay Williams, for example, I originally wrote her as a white women and she just decided she wanted to be Black, and I am not about to argue with a Black women, so she won that. She has turned into one of my absolute favorite characters and I so wish she actually existed. I would just sit and listen to her talk for hours. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think there’s more than a little bit of my Cherokee grandmother tucked inside her.

What do you hope readers will feel after finishing Whispers of the Pale Witch, and what can they look forward to next in the Beckett Coven series?

One of the best comments I’ve gotten so far from almost everyone who’s read Whispers is that they were thinking about it for days afterward. That is just the best compliment ever and is exactly what I wanted from this book. I also hope everyone takes a little something different from it, whatever speaks to them the most. People have been quite stunned by the ending, which is a good thing. When you finish Whispers you will be so annoyed that you have to wait until 2027 to see what happens next. There are a lot of twists and turns coming your way throughout this series. Book Two has more horror in it than the first, but I always try to temper that with some humor and other emotions. In Whispers of the Pale Witch the women who become the Beckett Coven are at odds with one another and you get to see how they come together. In Book Two, they are a solid coven but something really shocking tests them in ways they could never imagine. One thing I will say to keep in mind when you finish reading Whispers, no one’s story is finished.

S.A. Sizemore’s debut novel, Whispers of the Pale Witch, launches the Beckett Coven series in September 2026 from Rowan Prose Publishing. A playwright, Dramatists Guild member, and themed entertainment professional, she lives in Southern California with her wife and two dogs. Visit www.beckettcoven.com.

Interview published in The Relatable Voice Magazine - The RV Book Fair 2026 - Special. Download the full magazine for free at The RV Book Fair | Relatable Media.