Blog Tour: The Hunt for David Berman
Today, author Claire Mulligan joins me for the third stop on her blog tour for her debut novel, The Hunt for David Berman, to talk about how she started writing and her journey to getting published.
My Writing journey
When I was thirteen years old I wrote a story for an English class, my very first piece of writing set by my rather formidable teacher in my first year of secondary school. Mr Noonan liked the story so, rather than flinging my copybook to me across the class (which he had done to every other student), he asked me to come up and read it out loud. As I read and my classmates laughed at the funny bits and Mr Noonan smiled encouragingly I saw firsthand the power of the written word. As a child I loved reading and trips to the local library were a weekly occurrence and, under the guiding eye of Rose the librarian, I read a vast amount. Fast forward several decades and as a busy mum I wrote snippets here and there in my spare time. There were lists of words I liked, diaries I managed to keep for only a short time, surnames of people and interesting names over shop fronts, town lands, lines from poems. At that time I worked as a Montessori teacher and story time and picture books were a huge part of the children’s daily life. I read to my own children at home, stories on the sofa in front of the fire, board books the baby chewed on, bedtime books to help us settle down to sleep and I loved all of these books as much as my children did. I loved seeing how utterly engrossed they were in the characters lives or in whatever exciting adventure was happening in the book. I wrote a couple of children’s short stories and they were published in The Caterpillar Magazine. I also wrote a short story (this time for adults) which won third place in the RTE Radio 1 Short Story competition. And these two things really helped to build my confidence. I spent more time day dreaming and thinking of stories. I would walk the dogs each morning and slowly on these walks the beginnings of another story came. I wrote when I got the chance, moments of quiet in the day when the children were at school or late in the evening when the house was finally wrapped in sleep. I wrote more and more and as this story unfolded it began to change from story length to book length. And so here we are, The Hunt for David Berman is what that story turned into! I was glad to let the characters of Robert and David step out of my imagination and onto the page. When you have a story in your head it’s often all you can think of. Now I’m working on another book, this time set in 17th century Ireland - it features changelings, old magic and the Otherworld and those characters are dying to have their story told too...
The Hunt for David Berman by Claire Mulligan is published by The Moth on 5th May 2022, £8.99 paperback.