[©Cyndi Chambers Sports / 2024]
I always wanted to be a lawyer, at least from the age of fifteen. Pushed partly by my parents, who thought it built on my strengths (and who advised that attorneys made a good living), I started law school immediately after receiving my bachelor’s and graduated early—I wanted to get to work! To make a name for myself, make some money. I recall thinking I could take on the world.
And work I did, starting with a small firm in Jacksonville, Florida, and later another one in Tallahassee. We did (and I still do) municipal bond work, and our clients were and are scattered around the state, so I spent at least one day a week traveling, mostly in a car by myself. I remember at some point, maybe about ten years in, thinking to myself on one of these trips: there has to be more than this. So, I decided to try and do three things besides practicing law: to teach, to run for public office, and to try to write a book.
Eventually, I did all three: I taught a course on the Constitution for several years at the local community college (that was enough to cure me of that), ran for office, was elected and served as a city commissioner for ten years. And I started and finished a novel without knowing quite what I was doing, something I later saw expressed as the equivalent of waking one morning and deciding to go practice thoracic surgery. Miraculously, the novel was published by a regional press. I recall a work colleague telling me he had read the book, and expressing, with a note of surprise in his voice, that he thought it wasn’t bad.
Looking back, maybe this was all the result of an early mid-life crisis, but it’s one that has had an impact on my life. Each of my novels has a spiritual element to it, although I didn’t necessarily start out to do that with any of them. The Return is the story of a black woman who claims to be Christ returned, The Gendarme about the Armenian genocide, where a number of the survivors lost their faith in God, and my new novel, Boy With Wings, is about a boy with strange appendages on his back who ends up in a freak show traveling the South in the 1930s. In addition to being (I hope) entertaining, I’ve tried to write books that address things that matter, and that make readers think, without necessarily leading them to conclusions. In The Return, it was the question of expectations, and of whether there is Christ without miracles; in The Gendarme, whether someone can atone for horrific past acts. Boy With Wings deals with what it means to be different. The boy Johnny is seen by some as a devil, by others a monster and still others as an angel, reflecting more often than not the viewer’s own take on the world.
There’s an element of the author in almost every novel, and writing these books has dipped me into and out of my own quests of spiritual understanding. What do I truly believe? For some people this question is answered in young adulthood and remains fixed for life, but for me it’s been more of a journey. I’ve grappled with religion and God, balanced between the logical and the acceptance that there are things humans may not perceive or understand. Raised as a Southern Baptist, I’ve tried to challenge myself on why I believe what I do—is some of it simply muscle memory, and some parts superstition? On the other hand, there are things I can point to in my life that certainly seem more than sheer coincidence. I’ve tried to weave these complexities, doubts and convictions into the whole of my fiction. My hope is that it causes the reader to examine his or her beliefs, too.
I’ve continued to work as a lawyer over all these years, balancing or trying to my writing and other interests, as well as being a husband and father. Occasionally people will exclaim: “I don’t know how you do it all!” To which I respond: “There are long periods where I don’t feel that I’m doing any of it very well.” I feel, though, that the ability to engage in meaningful other outlets has enhanced and lengthened my career as an attorney (and I thank my law partners for their patience in allowing me to do so), as otherwise I think I would have burned out long ago. As the boy Johnny in Boy With Wings comes to realize: everyone is different and has to do things in their own way, and in this push and struggle we’re also more or less the same. 
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Mark Mustian is the author of the novels “The Return” and “The Gendarme,” the latter an international bestseller that has been published in eleven languages. He was a finalist for the Dayton International Literary Peace Prize, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Award for Writing, and the winner of the Florida Gold Book Award for fiction. He is the founder and president of the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music in Tallahassee, Florida, now in its tenth year. A former elected official and an attorney, he lives in Florida and Michigan with his wife and elderly dog. Learn more at: www.markmustian.com