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Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association's 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.
Kelly Mustian's website
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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 ...
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
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