A Peek at the Mystery Genre with Maria Melendez Kelson
As a part of Hispanic Heritage Month and this year’s visiting author series, the Kratz Center invited Maria Melendez Kelson, winner of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, on campus to talk about her new book Not the Killing Kind.
The book—which Maria Kelson says has taken 12 years and 8 drafts to make—takes a close look in Northern California, Redwood country, at a family in disarray. Boots Marez is a Latina single mother raising a headstrong eighteen-year-old boy she adopted six years ago, “trying to connect but having all the uncertainties that come with the relationship between a mother and her teen,” Kelson says. Boots also runs a school that helps the undocumented people in her politically divided town.
When her son Jaral is jailed for the murder of one of her former students, suddenly it’s up to Boots to prove him innocent. Kelson has always been fascinated by women leaders, and even more so interested in the way citizenship privilege creates a barrier between people and their families. This thriller touches upon both, as well as the theme of troubled dynamics in parenting—Kelson expresses how, as a young mother, parenting is an experience that has shaped most of her adult life. This thriller, hot off the presses with copies generously donated to those at the event by the Ivy Bookshop, is as Kelson puts it; not just a mystery but a gripping story about a “community where lives are lived”.
After Kelson takes to the podium, reading what she refers to as the “bloodiest excerpt” of her book—the prologue—she tells us what it was like to write Not the Killing Kind while still day jobbing and parenting full time. Kelson pinpoints similarities between her own struggles and those of the book’s main character Boots. Not the Killing Kind is all about the “pain of sacrificing the idea of what you thought would happen for what’s actually happening to you”. Repeatedly, we see examples of this in Kelson’s book. Main characters believe they have some idea of how the plan will work out or how the mystery will unfold, only to be repeatedly proved incorrect. Kelson knows all too well about the experience of “embracing that sacrifice.”
She says it’s an experience that comes “often in parenting”. Kelson touches on her experience dealing with upheaval while writing her book, most notably the pandemic hitting, and her job changing throughout the years. As Kelson says when relating the experience of upheaval back to her book, “when things in thrillers take a turn, they take a big turn”.
As Kelson continues to read the audience excerpts from her book, she pauses to share some wisdom with the audience’s aspiring writers. She introduces a scary idea called “failure fatigue”, the idea that you could fail so many times you’d get a feeling similar to physical exhaustion. It just so happens that the mystery genre has failure fatigue built into it—the protagonist failing and failing until the very end.
Kelson advises aspiring authors to “welcome the pain of sacrifice and seek out community” as she says it’s most helpful to “have other people walk with you”. When asked about how she stays motivated to write, Kelson cites the ticking clock. “The ultimate ticking clock is: Have you been granted immortality? If not, get moving!” Kelson asks writers to think about what it is they want to be able to look back on in three months. Have you improved? She tells writers to find things to celebrate, even if the thing you’re celebrating is merely opening the Word document. Set simple deadlines, know you’ll have to rewrite, read the last two chapters you wrote to get yourself inspired again, and remember “the only work it’s fair to compare your work to is your work”. In the end, Kelson reminds us aspiring writers that failure fatigue “is not a sign to not do something, but simply a sign that you are doing it.”
By Olivia DeSena ’28
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