Please join us for a Q&A with Kelly Mustian, author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name.
I’d like to welcome Kelly Mustian to our BookBrowse discussion. Kelly 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. Her second novel, The River Knows Your Name, was recently featured in our online discussion.
Please use this space to ask Kelly questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Kelly, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi, everyone. I’m so looking forward to chatting with BookBrowsers here. Thank you for the invitation. Being able to discuss books, mine and others, directly with readers is one of the most gratifying things about being an author. Readers have changed my life, made my writing dream come true, and I’m wildly grateful for that. So ask me anything. I’m an open book (so to speak)!
2 Likes
First of all let me tell you that I absolutely LOVED your book. I didn’t want to stop reading, and didn’t want the book to end.
It has intrigue and is a you-have-to-know-how-it-all-happened read and how it all turns out.
Question: Loved the characters’ names - how did you choose each name? They seemed to perfectly fit each character especially nasty Mildred. 
Thank you again for your beautiful book.
Your books’ settings certainly play a role in your novels - almost as if they were characters themselves. Why did you choose Nachez and Rodney as the settings for The River Knows Your Name?
1 Like
Why did you choose the two timelines that you did? What made you feel these eras worked best for the women’s stories in The River Knows Your Name?
1 Like
Was it easier to write Becca’s story, or Nell’s? Did you have another character you particularly enjoyed developing?
1 Like
@Elizabeth Thank you, Elizabeth. I saw your review and am so appreciative of you spreading good words about The River Knows Your Name. I’m sure you know what a difference good reviews make, and you are appreciated!
As for character names, with River, I chose them for the reason you mentioned–because they seemed to fit. Sometimes I go through online obituaries from Southern newspapers for inspiration. The Social Security Administration lists the most common baby names for each decade going way back, and that’s a really helpful resource. I also use a baby name book. Sometimes I just make up a name. There’s a sentence in River that makes me smile any time I happen to see it. It’s from a scene in Mildred’s house when Becca has come to meet her that mentions “Mildred’s piercing gaze.” That was a little wordplay I wrote just to amuse myself, because it reminded me of Joan Crawford in the old movie Mildred Pierce. And while Crawford wasn’t a villain in that movie, I think she would have been perfectly cast in the role of my Mildred in River.
1 Like
@kim.kovacs I always begin each writing project with setting–the physical and emotional landscape of a place. The swamp in The Girls in the Stilt House gave me a rich opportunity to further a theme in that story–the juxtaposition of beauty and brutality in that place at that time. I often say that all I really care about are pretty sentences (which is not exactly true, but close enough to truth), and I was able to use that swamp for analogies and metaphors and even to further the cadence of the sentences themselves–the “plop, plop, plop” of snakes falling into the water when the swamp flooded, for instance.
I work hard to put readers right into each of my settings because I love the feeling of “being there” when I read a good book. I couldn’t resist the ghost town of Rodney. That’s a real place that I’m familiar with, and I doubt that many people leave there without being haunted by it afterward. And having grown up in Natchez, I wanted to take readers to the river, to immerse them in the sounds and the smells and the feeling of old “Natchez Under-the-Hill,” so different from the pretty town atop the bluff. I love those kinds of contrasts and what a writer can do with something like that.
2 Likes
Wonderful you saw my review!! Glad it made your day.
Fun on the names and how you choose them.
Thank you.
1 Like
I need to read The Girls in the Stilt House. It sounds wonderful!!
Thank you.
1 Like
It absolutely made my day! I don’t see a lot of the reviews that come in, but I’m glad I saw yours.
Is it fun to write a character that is so sneaky and evil like Mildred? I received the book from BookBrowse and read it so quickly, loved it so much I bought The Girls in the Stilt House. Looking forward to what comes next.
1 Like
@Melinda_J Thank you for the kind words, Melinda. I hope you like Stilt House. I worked on that one for years.
It’s SO much fun to write a character like Mildred. Unlike the villains in The Girls in the Stilt House, whose actions were painful to write because there was so much historical truth underlying them, Mildred was someone I could enjoy playing with. It was something of a writerly game to come up with word choices in describing her house and her appearance: her yard “deeply shaded under old oaks with gnarled branches and expansive crowns that met in a united front against the sunlight”; “her black hair silvered as if she had just passed through a cobweb unawares”; the cast iron owl door knocker “staring back at [Becca] as if casting a feral spell”; her bedroom with its “scent of lavender gone bad” and its “air of generational staleness.” All that wordplay to hint at her creepiness before she opens her mouth and the really fun writing begins!
1 Like
@kim.kovacs I knew from the start that I wanted one character (Nell) to be digging into the past, looking backward for answers, while another character (Becca) was pressing forward, living in real time the events that Nell was finding clues to. I hoped that the links and overlaps between the two timelines would keep readers from feeling a blunt letdown when transitioning from one to the other. I made the choice to set the majority of the story in the Depression-era 1930s, and the 1971 period came about because of the age I wanted those to characters to be in that storyline. So the thirties was a creative choice, and the other decision was just math. I did know Natchez in the 1970s, though, so that was a plus.
1 Like
It sounds like you give a lot of thought to the structure of your novels, and I know the dual timelines was different from the way The Stilt House progressed - still two stories, but instead of overlapping them you told Ada’s first, then Matilda’s, before wrapping everything up. Did your first book inform how you chose to write the second, or was it more a case of “this is the story I want to tell, and this format works better”?
@kim.kovacs After setting, structure is one of my first choices when starting something new. As a reader, I’m a fan of interesting structures. I remember reading Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing years ago and feeling like I was stumbling in the dark until I realized that part of the story was written in reverse, each new chapter beginning a little earlier in time, something readers had to discover for themselves. Instead of throwing the book across the room, I was delighted with the puzzle of that structure. The structure of The River Knows Your Name is much less complicated, but it does have some complexity. The only influence the structure of The Girls in the Stilt House had on River was my wanting to do something different with the new work.
1 Like
@kim.kovacs Well, writing, at least for me, is never easy, but I know what you mean. Becca’s storyline was more in keeping with the style of writing I love–lush, lyrical, descriptive, emotional. The pretty sentences I mentioned in an earlier answer. That kind of language comes somewhat naturally to me. Nell’s sections were harder work, I think. They were more formulated, more built brick by necessary brick. Those sections had a job to do, holding up the plot and moving it along, while Becca’s sections meandered about looking at the scenery, smelling the roses, and listening to birdsong along the way.
As for another character I especially enjoyed developing, I had a lovely time with Drew. There’s always a character in my stories whom I’d love to have as a real-life friend, and Drew is that character from The River Knows Your Name. (Of course Gertie is my favorite in The Girls in the Stilt House.)
1 Like