Spreading Wings
A lifelong love of reading inspired Mark Mustian’s foray into writing

The open road and time on your hands is as good an invitation to creativity as any, and in his early career, Mark Mustian had plenty of both. The bond attorney spent hours driving across the state to visit clients—municipalities looking to bonds to fund their infrastructures—and used the long stretches in the car to compile a bucket list.
“Maybe it was an early midlife crisis,” says Mustian who lives with his wife Greta Sliger in Tallahassee where the couple raised three children. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s got to be more than this.’”
So, he set goals: to teach, run for public office, and maybe write a book. Mustian taught at Tallahassee Community College for a few years, and “that was enough to cure me of wanting to do that,” he says. In his mid-30s, he gave novel writing a go, publishing The Return in 2000 after years of work and a lucky break with a small press.
“Then, in a fit of insanity, I ran for the city commission,” says the author who remains a practicing attorney and serves as president of Nabors Giblin & Nickerson, PA. He was elected, and from 2003-2012, he served his hometown where he’s lived since he was 5 years old, save for his college and law schooling and a three-year stint in Jacksonville.
This month, Mustian debuts his third novel, Boy with Wings—a story set in the South in the 1930s that explores what it means to be different through the lens a youngster born with a physical difference that relegated him to life in a “freak show.”
Mustian came to the book business through a lifelong love of reading but says, “I had no idea what I was doing.” His second novel, The Gendarme, was published in 2010. It’s historic fiction, as is Boy with Wings, and both books required exhaustive research. “If you write historical fiction, you live in fear—I try to be really careful and have people review it for accuracy,” says Mustian who acknowledges that “sometimes, it’s necessary to be intentionally inaccurate.”
The Gendarme introduced Mustian to literary festivals, where he gave readings from the book across the South, and a new idea was born. “We should do something like this in Tallahassee,” he remembers thinking.
Mustian started brainstorming ways to make a Tallahassee event stand out, considering literature and the environment or politics. Turns out, books and music were the most appealing combination. “There was really nothing like this that I found anywhere,” he says about of Word of South, the literature and music festival he and a small group founded in 2015 with seed funds that came from deferred income he earned as city commissioner. He currently serves as the festival’s president.
This year’s festival takes place April 4-6 at Cascades Park. The ticketed headlining event on April 4 is a concert by the Violent Femmes and the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra. The rest of the weekend’s performances are free “mu-aushups”—collaborations between authors and musicians, some of whom have never met before. “We have 50 different acts on eight stages this year,” Mustian says. Mustian will appear with pianist Daniel Bedrosian, who also serves as the keyboardist for George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic.
“We mix it up, and that’s what’s interesting,” says Mustian, who likes the unexpected connections that come from the pair-ups. “We have authors and musicians from different places and genres—this year, we have some romantic fiction pieces and poetry. It’s going to be good.”
To learn more, visit: wordofsouthfestival.com, markmustian.com