A Chat with Maria Kelson – The Debut Novel and More

Published September 3, 2024

An Interview by Deborah L. Brewer

A debut novel, like other firsts, requires the mastery of various skills along a steep learning curve, including language, story mechanics, and professionalism. Like climbing Mt. Everest, publishing may be a profound personal accomplishment, but neither is achieved alone. There are other achievers along the same trail, some a little ahead, or a lot, others following behind. If you’re feeling the struggle of finishing your first novel, don’t despair. Take courage from those like Maria Kelson, who got it done.

Meet Maria

Maria Kelson writes crime fiction and speculative stories featuring Latinx characters with human problems. Her debut thriller, Not the Killing Kind, is set in northern California’s redwood country and comes out in hardback, e-book, and audio September 10, 2024, from Crooked Lane Books. The manuscript won Sisters in Crime’s inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color in 2014. Her speculative stories have been published in Lightspeed, LatineLit, and elsewhere. As Maria Melendez, she published two books of poetry with University of Arizona Press. A former editor of Pilgrimage magazine, she was selected to serve as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia, and has lived in nine of the United States.

Q & A

Debby: Welcome, Maria. Congratulations on your debut thriller, Not the Killing Kind. Thank you for sharing your experience with Writing from the Peak.

What drew you to the thriller genre? How was the novel inspired by your life experience? What aspects required research?

Maria: I had written poetry, essays, and short stories for years, and wanted to explore the dark side of human experience in a way that was still engaging for readers. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series inspired me, initially, to do that in the novel format. So it was crime writing, initially, that I wanted to explore. Gillian Flynn and Laura Lippman were my first thriller loves, as an adult, and I wanted to blend their books’ foregrounding of women’s lives with Mosley’s adeptness at incorporating social issues, family trouble, and parental pride.

In terms of life experience, my hubs and I raised two great kids, and because I became a parent in my early 20s, the mom-lens was a natural for this first novel. As a writer and reader, I have enjoyed the way thriller characters, emotions, and situations grow from real-life scenarios into larger-than-life tension and conflict, so although I’ve worked in a family literacy program in an elementary school, like Boots Marez, my protagonist, Boots has advanced to a leadership level in education that I never rose (or aspired) to. And although we had what I would consider a healthy amount of parent/child accord and discord while we had kids in the home, the fictional teenager in this novel gets into a scale of trouble that’s way off the charts.

To research the novel, I drew on conversations with undocumented families I’d had in my family literacy role, as well as conversations with Humboldt County, CA educators, corrections officers, and Latina community advocates.

Debby: Is this your first foray into novel writing or do you have other novels written, but unpublished? How did your experiences with publishing poetry, short speculative fiction, and editing for a magazine prepare you for the longer form of a novel?

Maria: I do have a different novel in a box under a stack of random other boxes. I wouldn’t call that a first novel, though, as it’s unfinished and abandoned at about the 130-page mark, when I realized the story had basically died—I was more interested in the ideas behind that story than the story itself, so I cut the whole thing loose. I went through the process of starting and ultimately leaving aside that manuscript about ten years before getting deep into the writing of Not the Killing Kind. 

Having years of experience in other forms of writing, along with a few years of experience editing, prepared me for novel writing by fully recruiting my belief in the gospel that revision is its own reward. 

Debby: At PPWC in April, you taught a session called “Don’t Pigeonhole Me: Use What Makes You Unique Without Writing Yourself into a Corner.”  Can you offer some advice on balancing what would appeal to the most readers with what is unique about an individual writer and their work?

Maria: Humans crave repetition with variation. We like seeing faces that repeat the pattern of two eyes, one nose, and one mouth, but we’re happy to see that no two faces are exactly alike.

So writers can feel free to lean way into the specifics of their unique experiences, insights, or empathies, provided they have a few “human universals” (family, relationships, loss, joy, etc.) strung along the ground-level of their work as a net beneath the high-wire act of their own personal artistry.

And the thing is, there’s no one way to say whether your writing truly works that can’t be contested by another way of looking at your writing, so if you’re bound to disappoint or piss off at least a certain percentage of your readers anyway, because, humans, then why not see where your work goes when you give your whole subconscious, your whole sense of play and adventure, room to roam?

In the several times I’ve attended PPWC, this sense of expansiveness is one of the things I’ve loved most—writers are encouraged to wander into any session that calls to them, and to stretch their interests by dropping into sessions for genres or craft elements they might never have considered before. That truly supports the lifelong process of growing as a writer!

Read the Publisher’s Weekly review for Maria’s new novel and pre-order it here.

Sign up for more updates from Maria at: https://mariakelson.com/

Deborah L. Brewer joined Pikes Peak Writers a decade ago, seeking help with a cozy mystery. When the novel was completed, she stayed for the camaraderie. Now she’s writing short stories. An editor for the PPW 2022 anthology, Dream, Deborah contributes to Writing from the Peak to help fellow PPW members write better with more enjoyment, and ultimately, achieve their writing dreams.