I love talking with authors, especially those who have found their writing voice after success in other careers. It almost seems the writer was always there, but it took time and experience to crystallize the desire to write.
So it was for Eileen Patricia Curran. Penning “short stories, poetry, lyrics, as a way to express myself” through- out her life, Curran explained to Prime that for many years writing “really was a personal creative outlet.
But fortunately for readers everywhere, the writing bug hit in earnest a few years ago and Curran decided to tackle some-
thing longer. Dissatisfied by the characters in many of the contemporary novels she’d read, the budding novelist decided to craft a story that revolved around the things the she knew and loved – Springfield’s Irish Catholic neighborhood of Hungry Hill and the relatives who lived there when she was a child.
Curran shared that one of the main characters in the novel, Maggie Reilly, was drawn heavily from a favorite maiden aunt named Catherine. When I asked how her aunt spelled her name, Curran turned to her “ancestry file” looking for a card she remembers her aunt had sent her years ago.
“There’s a lot of people who are now gone,” Curran mused as she flipped through the collected material, finally locating the card she was searching for. “She signed it ‘Your Auntie Catherine Curran,’ she noted, confirming her aunt’s name was spelled with a “C.”
Maggie’s well-worn brownstone was also drawn from Curran’s memories. Her father, Joseph Edward Curran, she explained, was the third generation to have grown up in a similar house where she “spent many afternoons visiting with family in the parlor next to the kitchen.” Even the name of the street where Maggie’s home is located – Cleveland- was an ode to her family’s ancestral neighborhood. “My great grandmother and her husband … lived on Cleveland Street,” she said.
Not everything in the novel came from childhood memories, of course. An early scene in the book, where the character Grace must euthanize a beloved dog was drawn, Curran said, from a short story she had written years earlier “on the day when I brought one of my dogs to the vet and had to have her put down.” The rest of the story, she said, just evolved. “In so many ways a writer has to live in [the world they create] and write about it, so I created characters that were living and connected and caring and that would bring me a lot of joy,” she said of “Hungry Hill.”
Click this link for a chance to win a copy of Curran’s novel.
It’s April, and on April 22, the world will celebrate the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day. What started as an American call to action on protecting the environment in 1970 is now a global movement that encompasses everything from plastic pollu- tion to air quality to the effects of fast fashion and farming practices. To learn more about this year’s initiative visit www.earthday.org.
Debbie Gardner
