Claire Fullerton is the multiple award winning author of 4 traditionally published novels and one novella. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Celtic Life International, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Website: https://www.clairefullerton.com/
Me: Tell us about Little Tea.
Claire: Little Tea concerns Southern culture, female friendships, family tragedy, and healing the past. Little Tea is actually the nickname of a character because Southerners are fond of nicknames! The story is a celebration of those deep friendships that last a lifetime–their shared history, loyalty, unconditional acceptance, and the importance of a sense of humor.
Me: Which scene was the most difficult to write and why?
Claire: There’s a particular scene in Little Tea that is pivotal in the story. I’d never had such an experience, so I used my imagination and employed all senses. The scene came together for me when I incorporated how the atmosphere sounded.
Me: How does the Southern setting influence your story?
Claire: Southern culture is part and parcel to Little Tea. I’ll go as far to say had the story been set anywhere else, the events couldn’t have happened as they did.
Me: Describe your journey to becoming an author.
Claire: It began for me with keeping a daily journal from a very young age. I kept a journal when I lived on the west coast of Ireland. When I returned to America, I wrote the book that became Dancing to an Irish Reel from what was in my journal. It’s been a steady build from there that includes 4 novels, one novella, and a recently completed manuscript.
Me: Who has been your greatest influence in becoming a writer?
Claire: All the fearless writers who dare to write in the first person! Beyond that, I admire Donna Tartt, Pat Conroy, Ron Rash, Anne Rivers Siddons, Billy O’Callaghan, and many of the Irish authors.
The Journey of Claire Fullerton from Memphis to Malibu
Thrive Global invites voices from many spheres to share their perspectives on our Community platform. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team, and opinions expressed by Community contributors do not reflect the opinions of Thrive Global or its employees. More information on our Community guidelines is available here. By Jose Angel Manaiza Jr, Tutor To The Stars at Malibu Education
Claire Fullerton is the traditionally published author of four novels and one novella. Her twenty book awards include the Literary Classics Book of the Year, the Independent Authors Network Book of the Year, and the International Book Awards Gold medal for Literary Fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines including Celtic Life International and Deep South Magazine. Claire is a book reviewer for The New York Journal of Books. She is represented by Julie Gwinn of the Seymour Literary Agency and has recently completed her fifth manuscript. She hails from Memphis, Tennessee, and has lived in Western Malibu for twenty years. Visit http://www.clairefullerton.com
Q: Tell me about your journey to your success as a writer:
A: A writer’s life is built incrementally. It begins by producing the work and submitting. I now look back and realize my career began with the discipline of keeping a journal from a very young age, which helped me develop as a writer. I’ve always submitted to magazines, and I’ll now credit Malibu’s Anne Sobel of the Malibu Surfside News for inviting me to write a weekly column for a full year about life in Malibu, titled, In First Person, from 2009 to 2010. The task taught me about the fine art of brevity and the precise use of language. I am a storyteller, in that I write fiction, and yet I love writing first person narratives. My first novel, A Portal in Time was published by a small press in 2013. That press published Dancing to an Irish Reel in 2016. In 2017, I signed with a literary agent, and my novel, Mourning Dove, a family saga, set on the genteel side of 1970’s Memphis, was published by Firefly Southern Fiction the following year. Mourning Dove helped me gain wider readership and went on to receive fifteen book awards. In May of 2020, Firefly Southern Fiction published my novel, Little Tea, whose title refers to one of its characters and which is about the power of female friendships, also set in the Deep South. I am now in the editing phase of my firth manuscript, and all told, I am grateful to do the work I love and am always thrilled to meet my readers!
Q: What advice would you give to young women and girls who’d like to follow in your writer footsteps?
A: The first thing I’d say to encourage a fiction writer is remain open to finding the story you’d like to tell. Commit to the work. An author’s career is all about balancing inspiration and discipline. Most of the work goes into revision. There is an adage that says, “Writing is re-writing,” and I’ve found that to be true. Submit your stories to magazines online, and in print. Build your resume. Confer with other writers, find your writing community, stay engaged. Establish an online presence. If you’d like to be traditionally published, do your homework on writing as a business. Learn how to look for a compatible literary agent and master the query letter. And once again, writers learn much from those who write as a career. It’s important for writers to find their tribe, on the way to finding their readership.
Q: What is your vision for the next five years?
A: I’d love the grace to continue doing what I love, day in and day out. What I’ve learned about writing is there is no “there” to get to. There is only the progress made as you stay the course of the path.
Former Child Star in La Ceiba, Honduras. Jose Angel Manaiza Jr. is known as “The Tutor to The Stars” from Malibu to Beverly Hills.Teaching the children of Hollywood celebrities to achieve success. Mr. Manaiza has helped over 1,200 students. Including NCAA student-athletes from schools such as UCLA, USC, and Pepperdine University.His patented speed-reading system is endorsed by three former U.S. presidents, and he has been honored in The White House.In 2018, Jose was knighted by the order of the OSJ in NYC. He was the first SAT Instructor to be published in The Huffington Post on the topic of “The New SAT Exam.” 58 of his students received an overall average score of 1456 on the SAT exam, and earned admissions with full scholarships.He has also been given a special recognition for his work from the City of Los Angeles, and the State Of California.Mr. Manaiza served as The Speaker Program Director for The California’s Women Conference in 2019, where past keynote speakers have included Oprah Winfrey, Norma T. Hollis, Michelle Obama, Dame Mabel Katz, Laura Bush and Arianna Huffington. He is official biographer of Garifuna Writer & Historian Santos Centeno Garcia. Mr. Manaiza is a professional speechwriter who has written over 6000 speech scripts to CEOs, world leaders, and professional speakers. His famous workshop entitled “Presidential Speechwrititng” has helped many on how to write speeches.Mr. Manaiza resides in Malibu, CA and enjoys his weekends sailing in Marina Del Rey. For more information, visit http://www.tinyurl.com/Malibu90265Style
I had an extraordinary time talking about writing, Southern Culture, Inspiration, and the writing life on the Storytellers Podcast with Grace Sammon, and I’m sharing the link for you here!
The Storytellers Radio Show and Podcast, hosted by Grace Sammon, focuses on individuals who choose to leave their mark on the world through the art of story. Each episode engages guests and listeners in the story behind the story of authors, artists, reporters and others who leave a legacy of storytelling. Applying her years of experience as an educator, entrepreneur, author, and storyteller herself, Grace brings to listeners an intimate one-on-one experience with her guests. The Storytellers is heard in over 150 countries. Each episode airs twice weekly on The Radio Ear Network subsidiaries of SOB Radio Network and Society Bytes Radio. Shows then become available at the links below and on SOB Radio at and Society Bytes Radio To contact Grace about being a guest on the show, email her here.
Claire Fullerton has always known she’s a storyteller. She was born in Wayzata, Minnesota (the homeland of her father) and transplanted at the age of ten to Memphis, Tennessee (the homeland of her mother). She learned early that the art of observation can be an acclimating lifesaver. Her mother told her that as a child, she would sit and watch people. Claire was thirty years old the first time her mother said this, then her mother added: “You still do.” It is what is known as “the writer’s eye,” the ability to see the world from the outside in. If that is true, Claire admits, she is happily guilty.
Claire currently lives in Malibu, California, but will always consider herself a Southerner: a card-carrying member of the last romantic culture on earth. She found her niche in music radio as a member of the on-air staff of five different stations, during a nine-year career. Three weeks after her return to the United States from a year-long trip to Ireland, she reviewed the journal she kept while living abroad and knew then that she had a good story to tell. Today, she is the author of eight traditionally published books and multiple essays. Claire is a much sought-after speaker and radio guest with a strong voice for women’s fiction and the voice of the American South. Listen
I’m in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, which is in California’s Central Coast, on the Monterey Peninsula. The climate here is the draw: it is year-round, temperate weather, often shrouded in coastal fog, which gives it a misty quality that reminds me of historic parts of the UK. What makes this part of California unique is the prevalence of cypress tress. I have spent the past few days going down to Carmel Bay for a long walk on its white, powder sand, and can’t resist photographing the area with the convenience of my cell-phone camera! I’m sharing the photographs I’ve taken here so you can get an idea for the magic that is Carmel-by-the-Sea, California!
“finely wrought story sure to enthrall the most discerning reader.”
A fateful phone call from a brother not heard from in twenty years is the catalyst of author Christopher Swann’s spellbinding novel, A Fire in the Night, but it isn’t discovered until later in this action-packed thriller set in the mountainous region of Cashiers, North Carolina, that unfolds in riveting, oscillating layers of past and present tense.
Nick Anthony is an intentional loner. A retired college professor of medieval studies, he is a grieving widow living in an isolated lakeside cabin without a landline, so he is startled one morning to discover the uniformed Deputy Joshua Sams standing on his front porch.
It is bad news from the deputy. There has been a house fire in Tampa, his estranged brother is dead, and the sixteen-year-old niece named Annalise, whom he’s never heard of, is missing. Nick is found by Deputy Sams because his brother, Jay, told his lawyer that Nick is his next of kin.
At the unexpected news, Nick “was too weary to cry. Over the past year he had cried enough over Ellie for a lifetime,” but “Something shifted in his heart, rode beneath his skin,” and “He was angry. At Sams, for disturbing his morning. At Jay for not telling him about his niece—for dying.” The stunned Nick processes the news, and “Something circled at the back of Nick’s mind like an errant bat.” Nick, in considering Annalise, concludes, “If the police were looking for her, it was because she was a suspect.”
Annalise is in fear for her life and suspects her parents were murdered. While staying overnight at her boyfriend’s Tampa house, she saw the flames of the fire and, upon investigation, spied the men who apparently set it. Taking two days to flee to her uncle Nick’s North Carolina cabin, she arrives at night, exhausted and feverish, armed with a map her father had given her to give to Nick, though she is uncertain of Nick’s true identity until she puts him to her question-and-answer test. In time, Nick and Annalise vet each other and realize they are in it together, and the pair set out to unravel the mystery of what really happened to Jay.
Cole is ex-military and hired by a man named Mr. Kobayashi to track down Annalise, in hopes of acquiring sensitive information Jay had that’s thought to be on a flash drive. With a handful of hired hands, each paid a thousand dollars a day by Mr. Kobayashi, Cole and his cohorts track Annalise from Tampa to Atlanta to Cashiers reconnaissance style. They act as a gaggle of hardened criminals with do-or-die motivation, which heightens the story’s gripping, on-the-chase suspense.
Because Nick’s family has ties in Afghanistan, Nick suspects his brother acted as a contractor in the Middle East, in a dubious manner that either involved privileged information or arms. When the map Annalise gives Nick turns out to be a geological survey of a Middle Eastern oil field, the pair are led to a private investigator in Charlotte, North Carolina, who was entrusted by Jay, and in turn, Nick is tasked with locating proper means to decipher encrypted information on the flash drive his brother left in the PI’s care, while simultaneously protecting Annalise from Cole and his men as they get closer and closer.
Twists and surprises abound as the story unfurls, and Nick’s past experience as a CIA operative comes to light and is put to use in a way that counters Nick’s sedate life. Nick realizes, “He had stepped away from that life, with fewer regrets than he had felt later upon leaving academia to care for Ellie. But there were moments, when he had been in his office grading papers or sitting in a faculty meeting or even watching Ellie sleep that he found himself bored and restless, longing for something, that old shot of adrenaline that sent the pulse racing and the senses on high alert.”
A Fire in the Night folds mystery and suspense into a psychological thriller in a setting that lives as breathes as a character. The remote, mountain woods of Cashiers, North Carolina, are multilayered and foreboding. They are the beautifully described, perfect backdrop for this finely wrought story sure to enthrall the most discerning reader.
Claire Fullerton’s most recent novels are Little Tea and multiple award winner, Mourning Dove. Honors include the Independent Book Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Regional Fiction, the Reader’s Favorite for Southern Fiction Bronze Medal and various other literary awards.
I’m sharing this post about the release of Rebecca Rosenberg’s book, Champagne Widows, from author, Susan Cushman, whose latest book, John and Mary Margaret released last June, and whom I featured here. I love it when authors support authors!
To refresh your memory on Susan Cushman’s book, here is the cover of John and Mary Margaret.
And here is Susan’s blog post on today’s release of Rebecca Rosenberg’s, titled, Champagne Widows!
Happy pub day to Rebecca Rosenberg! Here’s the blurb I wrote for the book, which I’ve also posted on Amazon and Goodreads:
Rebecca Rosenberg has penned a spectacular saga of the first of the “Champagne widows” of France, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot. With her gift, known as Le Nez (the nose), Barbe-Nicole can “smell the stink of a lie or the perfume of a pure heart. Or the heartbreaking smell of what could have been.” Along with her expertise she possesses courage and vision, overcoming incredible odds again women who dare to step up as entrepreneurs during the time of the Napoleonic Code, which left widows without rights to property—in Barbe-Nicole’s case, her Champagne business. Seamlessly interwoven with historical letters from Napoleon, the book sweeps the reader into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century world. But it’s her imaginative tale of Veuve Clicquot’s personal life that captured me and wouldn’t let go until the end, leaving me wanting more!
Book Description:
From triple-gold award-winning author, Rebecca Rosenberg: Champagne, France, 1800. Twenty-year-old Barbe-Nicole inherited Le Nez (an uncanny sense of smell) from her great-grandfather, a renowned champagne maker. She is determined to use Le Nez to make great champagne, but the Napoleon Code prohibits women from owning a business. When she learns her childhood sweetheart, François Clicquot, wants to start a winery, she marries him despite his mental illness.
Soon, her husband’s tragic death forces her to become Veuve (Widow) Clicquot and grapple with a domineering partner, the complexities of making champagne, and six Napoleon wars, which cripple her ability to sell champagne. When she falls in love with her sales manager, Louis Bohne, who asks her to marry, she must choose between losing her winery to her husband, as dictated by Napoleon Code, or losing Louis.
In the ultimate showdown, Veuve Clicquot defies Napoleon himself, risking prison and even death.
Praise for Champagne Widows!
“These first known women of Champagne/Sparkling winemaking may not have even realized how strong they were until they had to learn and do it all to survive for themselves and their wineries! Reading Champagne Widows makes it even more of an honor to learn a craft still dominated by men.” ~Penny Gadd-Coster, Executive Director of Winemaking, Rack & Riddle
“For anyone who loves champagne, a must-read novel about Veuve Clicquot.” ~ Judithe Little, best-selling author of The Chanel Sisters
“Award-winning author, Rebecca Rosenberg returns with another Historical Fiction jewel in CHAMPAGNE WIDOWS. Meet the women who succeeded in creating world class champagne in a time men ruled business and society. Lovers of history, romance, and French culture will relish the multi-layered plot and cast of characters including the ultimate French icon, Napoleon Bonaparte.” ~Johnnie Bernhard, award-winning author of Sisters of the Undertow
With crisp writing, Rebecca Rosenberg serves us the sparkling story of Veuve Clicquot, an independent woman of indomitable strength, determined to find her way in a man’s world. Champagne Widows is vintage storytelling. ~Jean M. Roberts, author of The Heron
“Like the best wines, Rosenberg’s Champagne Widows will entice you with its complexity as it balances the story of a widow’s determination to produce the world’s greatest champagne in the face of Napoleon’s path of destruction. If you love France, historical fiction, underdog stories, strong women, or wine, then pop a cork to celebrate this perfect blend of a novel.” ~Mary Helen Sheriff, author of Boop and Eve’s Road Trip
Congratulations to Rebecca Rosenberg, and gratitude to Susan Cushman!
![John and Mary Margaret by [Susan Cushman]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51GoPW5fQ6S.jpg)
![Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot by [Rebecca Rosenberg]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51RHe6PUQNL.jpg)
Claire Fullerton Author 