Kiersti Giron Interview

I had the amazing pleasure of interviewing Kiersti and sitting down to talk about her new book Beneath a Turquoise Sky. We had such a great time meeting each other and discussing the inspiration and history behind her book, which I was lucky enough to also receive an ARC of to review. (Read that here.)

I have also edited some tidbits of the live interview. You can view those pieces at the end of the written question and answer section that's below. I hope you all enjoy a look into Kiersti and the heart of her story. Happy reading!

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(Payton Tilley)

So I'm really really excited to hear the answers to all of them. I will ask before we get into it, how do we say our hero's name properly?

(K Giron)

That's a good question. I maybe should have had like a pronunciation guide in there or something. Um, but the best of my understanding it's s kind of like a sneeze; I know one time I said Caroline thought it sounded like a sneeze. Yeah.

(Payton Tilley)

Yeah, I remember that part. Okay, cool. Awesome. I actually looked up different pronunciations and was listening to all of them. So, what was your favorite scene to write in this novel?

(K Giron)

That was a hard one, but I was thinking it was the scene where they take the children to the river for a picnic. Just that kind of whole sequence. I found that fun. Even though afterwards things kind of go badly for a while, that was a really kind of happy, sweet time. And that was fun to write. And I had memories of going to that river when we lived in New Mexico.

(Payton Tilley)

That's really cool. I think that was one of my favorite scenes, too. I loved their whole banter they had with each other and joking around. The kids were having fun. I thought that was a great scene. I loved it so much. So also in your bio it mentions that you have a lifelong passion for history. Was that true even when you were growing up to a degree?

(K Giron)

When I was, I think five, my mom started reading me the Little House on the Prairie books and I just fell in love with them. And I think from then on, like before that, I'd been into like princesses and Cinderella, but from like five on, I loved historical fiction. I used to tell myself stories about being in the past, like my mom says, I would walk in circles around the living room or the front yard just telling myself stories. So, it goes way back. It's evolved.

(Payton Tilley)

Wow, it's ingrained in you. So, do you have a favorite historical time period that you lean towards?

(K Giron)

In terms of what I love to read and learn about, it was always 1800s, but interestingly, my writing seems for my own novels ends up more early 1900s. So, but still pretty close.

(Payton Tilley)

That is really close. Um, this kind of goes along with it, but if you weren't writing in that time period, which one would you pick?

(K Giron)

That's a good question. I enjoy reading like 1800s century novels like Laura Frantz and Lori Benton and such, but I've never really felt like I wanted to write there for some reason.

(Payton Tilley)

Awesome! I also noticed a theme in Beneath A Turquoise Sky, kind of talking about identity and Jesus healing our brokenness and that sort of thing. Is that a theme that's very important to you in all of your novels that you write?

(K Giron)

Again, you have such good questions. I would say yes. Like the simple answer would be yes. But there always seems to be some theme of healing and often healing coming through building relationships with people different from you, but of course most importantly Jesus coming into that. So yes, it seems like all of us need healing in one way or another.

(Payton Tilley)

Yeah, that is very true. I thought that was really pretty that you had that in your bio. I also loved how throughout this book it was them {characters} understanding each other's culture and then figuring out their identity from that. Was any of that pulled from stories that you were told?

(K Giron)

So, that's a good question But yeah, in some ways the characters kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, you know, it was probably the Lord's in some way! I just I needed to write a story for a screenplay for a college class my last semester of college, which I'd never written a screenplay before. I didn't have that much interest in writing a screenplay and I thought what in the world am I going to write about and I thought of that old kind of writing adage write that is write what you know. And so which of course that can be limiting in some ways obviously since I wrote about a lot that I didn't know, but I started thinking well what kind of worlds or areas do I know, and I thought of New Mexico. It had only been a few years since we moved back at that point, and then these three characters of Caroline, Willis, and Tse just came into my head. Not that I knew their names yet, but um it just popped in there. And so it was kind of needing to research and learn their stories that the themes and story kind of developed from there.

(Payton Tilley)

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

(K Giron)

I'm kind of in between. I know writers who plot out, you know, every single scene ahead of time and that doesn't work for me. But I also can't just write off the seat of my pants like some people can. So, I need to have a general outline of where I'm going. But then things do change along the way. I need to know the main plot points ahead of time, but then I tend to do almost like a rolling outline. Thinking like, okay, this is what the next three chapters will be in more detail. Then I kind of outline a rough idea of this the scene or the chapter that I'm working on right there. And then once I write that, I do the next little bit. But I still have a big picture of where I'm going.

(Payton Tilley)

Yeah. So, back to the screenplay. How did you decide after you wrote the screenplay in college and did all that to write it? Did it stay in your head that you wanted to write it into a novel or was it something that kind of hit you one day and you're like, "I'd really love for this to be a story"?

(K Giron)

Oddly enough, it was my professor. For the the class, we had to write half of the screenplay fully and then do a treatment of the rest of it. But when I did that, he said, "Are you going to finish this puppy?" To me, I guess he thought there was something there. And I said, "Yes." Because I didn't want to say no because that would sound really lame. So I finished it. I actually graduated by that point, but then he told me, "Bring it to me when you do finish it." And so I finished it and I brought it to him and then he said, "I think this is more of a novel. I think you're more of a novelist, not a screenwriter." And so I was like, "Okay." So I did start turning it into a novel. And then another professor kind of dragged me to my first writer's conference when I still hadn't finished turning it into a novel. But the connections I made there, everything just kind of kept going from there. Then, I think it wasn't until I was actually in the process of turning into a novel that I first went and met Ted and Evie Charles and started visiting them and just really digging deeper into the story and the research.

(Payton Tilley)

Awesome. That's really cool. So, we have the professor to thank for the story.

(K Giron)

I guess. Yes, he's in my acknowledgements for sure, Dr. Ezelstrom.

(Payton Tilley)

He was definitely right about it being novel material, but who knows, maybe one day it will be a screenplay, too. That would be cool. Okay. So, could you share with us your favorite thing about writing?

(K Giron)

I guess one thing I've thought of, is sometimes, as you know, writing can feel so hard even when you love it so much. It can feel like the hardest thing in the world at least for me. First drafts are really hard for me especially. But I think there's just this sense of something almost supernatural about it sometimes, especially in those first drafts. Just kind of getting to co-create with God, I guess. And just realize even when you're struggling through that all of a sudden on the page there's like characters and something that didn't exist before and then it just happened there on the page and now can, you know, exist in other people's minds and hearts and that. Um, so that would probably be my favorite thing, I think, just kind of getting to be part of that process and even when I feel very inadequate for it, seeing the Lord still do stuff through it.

(Payton Tilley)

That's great. The whole creation part of it is probably one of the best parts. So, flip side of that, do you have a part you don't like?

(K Giron)

Yeah, yes. Um like I said, first drafts can be like pulling teeth for me although there are parts where it feels really miraculous and amazing! So there's really special things about first drafts too, but writing a synopsis and writing a blurb and all of those those things I find a bit of a struggle.

(Payton Tilley)

That's a good point. So Beneath A Turquoise Sky has tons of the Navajo language written in it, which I loved that you did. It was so rich with it. I love feeling immersed in the history part of that. But your characters mentioned that at this time period, it wasn't written. So, could you walk us through some of the history of that?

(K Giron)

I actually had to look up when was it written for sure. I wasn't sure if it was with the Navajo code talkers in World War II because it looks like they started trying to write it down around the 1930s and 40s. I don't know how much you know about the Navajo code talkers, but I know one reason they used Navajo then was that it was still not really written or standardized.

(Payton Tilley)

Exactly. I was actually raving about your book to someone and we got on that topic because I was asked, "When was it because I know they didn't know it then?!"

(K Giron)

So, yeah like so it was sometime around around then, like maybe later in the 40s, from the best I could tell; I found kind of conflicting things. And I think also - it's changed how it was written down. Like even up to the the final drafts of this book, I kept finding the most updated spellings of these words. Several words I needed to change several times how they were spelled or where the accents were because it's doesn't fit very neatly into English spelling. Some of the sounds and the language are not words that we use normally.

(Payton Tilley)

Makes sense! The reverend also, you did a great job because I could not decide how I really felt about him in so many moments. Like he felt like one of those people in real life that you're like, "How do I really feel about you? What would I say to you in this moment?"

(K Giron)

That makes me think of that same professor I remember in the class. One thing he said kind of influenced the development of Willis because he said something like, "The most powerful conflicts or stories come when you pit good intentions against goof intentions rather than just like oh super obvious evil villain or something". And I thought that was interesting.

(Payton Tilley)

Yeah, yeah. They have the depth. That's really good advice. So, the last question that I wrote down to ask you was, as this is your first solo historical novel, what has been the most rewarding part for you overall?

(K Giron)

Um, I think probably, I mean I still feel like such a newbie, but I think just hearing and connecting with people like you that I didn't know before at all and who've been blessed by the story. That's just kind of an amazing feeling that I really hadn't known before because of course I have, you know, friends and family who have read the story before and who liked it, but having people that I didn't know at all before and connecting with just wonderful people like you and finding out that my story can touch people that I didn't know, that's been really neat.

(Payton Tilley)

When did you start writing for Lauraine {Snelling}?

(K Giron)

It's been a journey for sure. It was, um I think, August of 2020 that we started. So coming up on five years, which is amazing. But yeah, and she was actually my mentor at my first writer's conference ever. I was in a newbie group and she was leading one of the Head Start groups and that's how I first met her.

(Payton Tilley)

So, I did want to ask, were there any people that you talked to specifically about the Navajo culture and the different stories and the beliefs that are in the book that really helped you flesh them out?

(K Giron)

Ted and Evie Charles, this older couple (K Giron) who just really took me in, they definitely had the most influence on both talking with me, you know, reading my manuscript, correcting things that weren't right, taking me to all these different sites all around the reservation, at a canyon dash and trading posts and, um you know, introducing me to other people. There are also some missionaries that we knew through our time in New Mexico who introduced me to people who had gone to boarding school as children. I don't know if they're even living anymore. They were elderly then. But for things like the the ceremony that Tse attends, which I just described kind of vaguely in the outside because I don't even know what goes on on the inside, but those things were more from research and books and things like that. But but I checked them with my friends to make sure it was accurate.

(Payton Tilley)

That was perfect. So, that's really cool that you actually got to see different parts of what you actually wrote, so you knew perfectly how to describe it. That's awesome. I did not realize that they thought owls meant death was coming. So, that was really, really cool. That was really interesting. I will confess that a few people know that now because I was just like, "Did you know . . . " And they were like, "Why do you know that?"

(K Giron)

This was one of the mistakes that I made that had to be corrected as I did find it out online, which of course you can't trust all things online, but uh supposedly Navajo girls' name could be one that meant owl. I had that be her name, but Ted Charles told me, "Oh, you know, parents would not name their child Owl. That's like, you know, almost a curse." I was like, "Oh, good point. Thank you for telling me that." So, he changed it to one of his granddaughter's names, actually. So, I thought that was cool.

(Payton Tilley)

So, are there any plans for a sequel or any more set in this area with the characters?

(K Giron)

That's a good question. I do have ideas for sequels. I really don't know if that will ever come to pass or not, but we'll see. One step at a time. But that's good to know that there's interest to them.

(Payton Tilley)

Oh, yeah, definitely! Thank you for getting on here and answering these questions. I really, really appreciate it.

I had such a wonderful time chatting and getting to ask Kiersti these questions about her book that is now out in the world. Thanks again for taking the time to read this. Please feel free to share this on your social media pages and tell others about the book if you read it! (Always share the love of an author's hard work and heart.)

If you're interested in purchasing a copy of Beneath A Turquoise Sky, please pick up your copy here!

Check out some fun clips from the interview below!