When author Minrose Gwin traces her connections to Columbus and Mississippi University for Women, the long blue line goes back four generations — all the way to her great-grandmother, one of its earliest graduates.

Gwin, a Tupelo native who attended MUW herself, recently returned to campus as a featured speaker at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium last month to present “Beautiful Dreamers,” her fourth novel and ninth book.

While Gwin now resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, her new book takes place in the familiar territory of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the fictional Belle Cote, based on Bay Saint Louis.

“One of the things that I loved about writing this book was being able to write the descriptions of a part of Mississippi that I kind of adopted and just love,” Gwin said in an interview with The Dispatch. “I really wanted to do a book that described that beautiful, beautiful sunset on the sound, and the peacefulness of that place, and the joy of just being there.”

In “Beautiful Dreamers,” Gwin deftly crafts a historical coming-of-age tale with heartbreaking consequences. Set in the 1950s, her novel tells the story of the mother and daughter Virginia and Memory, who move in with Virginia’s best friend Mac after their family breaks apart.

As the Civil Rights Movement plays out, the two adults become rivals when Tony, a new love interest with a shady past, appears. The tragedy that results is reminiscent of a literary figure Columbus knows well: the one and only Tennessee Williams.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

We have to start with the protagonist, Memory Feather, and her name. Can you tell me how you came to her name?

Sometimes names just come to you, and that’s what happened in the case of Memory Feather. It started off with the feather part. Memory has an affinity for thinking that she is having conversations with animals, and she particularly is interested in wetland birds. In fact, when she grows up as an adult, and she is an adult telling this story, she is a biologist who studies shorebirds. So the whole idea of “feather” is part of the story of Memory Feather.

Virginia and Mac have this great backstory of being lifelong childhood best friends. Is this based on any relationship in your own life?

That goes back to a relationship that my mother had with a man in Tupelo named David Baker. They grew up as children together, and they were in high school together and they were very good friends. In fact, David was bringing her homework assignments after she had fallen off a horse and broken her shoulder when the Tupelo tornado struck in 1936. Both of them were in my grandparents’ house when that happened. So there was a very strong closeness between my mother and David Baker.

In fact, my own father left us in the same way that Memory’s father left her right after I was born. In my young childhood, my mother was friends with David Baker, and what I recall is that he was the only person I knew during that sad period in her life who made her laugh.

What do you think is harder, writing the true story or this fictionalized version of the story?

Having written a memoir about my mother and her mental illness in her later years, and my difficulties in trying to help her and deal with this, I think it may be harder to write the true story. Because in fiction, you can make up things and you can use life experiences.

Of course, we always write into what we know. But also, I think if fiction is any good, the author is also writing into what she or he doesn’t know and trying to explore these unanswerable questions. Memoir does that too. … But I do think it’s harder in many ways to get everything to adhere to the truth and not slip into fiction. And I think the truth and fiction are so closely intertwined sometimes, that it’s very hard to pull them apart.

Virginia Feather is very headstrong, and she has a tense, difficult relationship with her parents. Can you talk about that dynamic?

She is very prideful. That’s her strength in a way, and that’s her flaw in a way. Sometimes this gets her in really big trouble. She would rather die than take that $50 a month from the father, who is now in France, or ask her own parents for help. So she’s a complicated character. At times you think that she hates her parents. And at times you think, well, she just disagrees with them on certain points.

There’s a love triangle between Tony and Virginia and Mac, and you see Virginia and Mac twist themselves into knots to win him. Why?

I’ve always been really interested in this kind of person, and I’ve never written about a person like this before – this kind of person who is very, very physically attractive, and also very, very charismatic, and likable, lovable, who is able to wrap people around their little finger.

That person can do a lot of good in the world, but also a lot – if they are on the other side of the equation – a lot of ill in the world.

What is it that makes a person like that? I don’t know the answer to that question still, but I really wanted to explore that question about how people can be made, or coerced, or seduced into being people who they’re really not.

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.