Kelly Mustian Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Kelly Mustian

A conversation with Kelly Mustian, author of The River Knows Your Named

Kelly stopped by the BookBrowse Community Forum to answer member questions. You can view the whole conversation here.

What inspired you to write The River Knows Your Name? Why did you choose to set it in the 1930s and the 1970s?

My earliest inspirations were, as they almost always are with a new story, related to landscape and setting. I knew I wanted to revisit Mississippi, particularly the historically notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill and the old ghost town of Rodney, each rich in literary possibilities. I grew up on the Mississippi River in Natchez, and like Evie and Lottie in the novel, I made friends with the river early on. Both the Mississippi River and the New River in North Carolina, where I live now, inspired what became a river theme running through the novel.

Many of the stories my mother and grandmother told me about their young lives were from the 1930s, heavily influenced by the Great Depression. As a result, I felt at home writing in that decade, could envision life in a dusty ghost town or in a river house under the bluff in that period. And I had my own memories of Mississippi in the 1970s to draw from as well.

With not much more than those settings and periods and a kernel of an idea about two sisters living in the shadows of their mother's secrets, I began writing. And as usually happens, the story took shape, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, my progress like driving on a dark road with the low beams on, seeing just far enough ahead to make the next turn.

The characters move from place to place throughout the story, yet each location is distinctly atmospheric. What difficulties did you encounter in working with multiple settings?

It's important to me to steep a story in its setting, to give readers a sense of being right there in that place, wherever it is. With so many relocations to deal with, sustaining the kind of atmospheric nature I'm always striving for was difficult. With that in mind, I worked with detail and description, with sights and sounds and smells, and with tying especially emotional scenes to the characters' surroundings in ways that I hoped would engage readers' emotions and perhaps remind them of something deeply felt in their own lives.

What was your process for writing this book? Did you first write the storylines separately, or did you work on them together?

My process involved a notebook with detailed and ever- changing timelines, a wall of color- coded sticky notes, and kids' bathtub crayons in my shower because that seems to be where all the best ideas present themselves.

Sometimes I wrote many chapters of one storyline before switching to another. Often I returned to the beginning and started again, working through the chapters in a straight line, making sure everything fit together.

With Nell reaching backward from 1971 and Becca and Hazel moving forward in the early 1930s, each of them providing unique clues to what happened in 1934, the weaving together of their stories became quite complex. Every change had a wide ripple effect on other chapters. My wall of organized sticky notes helped me to see the whole picture clearly from draft to draft.

What kind of research went into the writing of this novel?

I reread old notes I'd made about my mother's and grandmother's reminiscences of Mississippi in the 1930s. (Ball lightning really did roll through my mother's childhood home one day!) I ferreted out what little information there is about Rodney in the 1930s in books and periodicals and historical records. I pestered an online group of kind people who have family ties to Rodney, a few of whom lived there themselves as it was fading away. I was granted permission to see the upstairs rooms of a two-hundred-year-old building—currently a long-established saloon believed to have had an early history as a brothel—in Natchez Under-the-Hill, and though by then I had already writ- ten the chapters that are set in a brothel, walking through those old rooms was like stepping into those scenes. I took research trips to Rodney and Natchez—walked the dirt road through the ghost town and stood on the bluff at Natchez—and in my writer's head and heart, it was 1934.

Evie and Becca associate colors with words and, in Evie's case, music. What is behind that sense of color they shared?

That was inspired by my son's own experience with synesthesia. He sees words and musical notes in colors in his head, much as Evie does in the story. I've always found that fascinating.

Why did you choose to end the story as you did?

It's a tragic story, so a conventional happy ending would not have fit. In a sense though, the ending is something of a fulfillment of Nell's early sentiment that as a child she had wished for a different sort of family, while Evie had desperately wanted a sense of belonging with Hazel. Nell found a second mother in Evie's Becca, and Evie gained the bond she had longed for with Hazel.

What do you want readers to take away from this story?

What I've come to believe after hearing from so many readers of The Girls in the Stilt House is that there is nothing better to hope for than that something in this story will connect with the personal experiences of readers and offer them something meaningful. That makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.