Claire Fullerton - Writer

I’ve always known I'm a storyteller. Having been born in Wayzata, Minnesota (the homeland of my father) and transplanted at the age of ten to Memphis, Tennessee (the homeland of my mother,) I early learned that the art of observation is an acclimating lifesaver.  My mother told me that as a child, I would sit and watch people. I was thirty years old the first time she said this, and she added: "You still do.” If what is known as “the writer’s eye” or "the actor’s eye" is the ability to inhabit worlds from the inside looking out, then I am happily guilty. 

 

Although I now live in Malibu, California, I consider myself a Southerner: a card-carrying member of the last romantic culture on earth. While I was growing up, Memphis was a hot bed of social and cultural change. In this atmosphere, I embraced popular music, for the city that sits on the bluff of the Mississippi is a musical mecca, and I wanted to be in its middle.  I found my niche in music radio as a member of the on-air staff of five different stations, during a nine-year career.  

​

Music radio led me to the music business, and the music business led me to Los Angeles, where I worked for three years as an artist’s representative, securing record deals for bands. 

 

From Los Angeles, I took a trip to the west coast of Ireland and ended up in Connemara, in a village called  Indreabhan-- Inverin in English- for a full year. I worked at a startup music resource center in Galway and fully embraced Irish culture. 

 

 An uncanny twist of fate directed me back to Los Angeles. When I scanned the journals I kept while living in Ireland, I knew I had a good story. I started the draft of what became my second published novel, but years intervened between its inception and publication.

 

I wrote a weekly column for The Malibu Surfside News, titled In First Person,  and submitted to writing contests and magazines as I developed my craft.  

 

In 2012, I wrote a paranormal mystery about a woman who suspects she's lived before and titled it A Portal in Time.

 

 Vinspire Publishing published A Portal in Time, so I showed them the manuscript of my Irish novel. Vinspire Publishing published it 2015 under the title Dancing to an Irish Reel. 

​

My third novel is titled Mourning Dove. It's a sins-of-the-father, Southern Family Saga, set in 1970's and 1980's Memphis. It was published by Firefly Southern Fiction in June of 2018, and to date, it has won 13 book awards. 

 

Little Tea was released in June of 2020. It's set in the Deep South, in three locations: Memphis, Tennessee; Como, Mississippi; and Greers Ferry Lake in Heber Springs, Arkansas. It's the story of long-lasting female friendships, the kind that start in childhood and last the ages. Three women friends who've known each other's since childhood reunite after a long separation and examine life, love, the meaning of happiness, and ultimately heal a turbulent past predicated on the grip of Southern social mores.  To date, Little Tea has won 6 book awards. 

 

 I experience the world as an artist. Artists have an inexplicable urge to interpret the world, and this is the reason why I'm also an actor, a lover of Shakespeare, and a perpetual student of classical and contemporary acting.