Eileen Patricia Curran, HUNGRY HILL
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[0:41]Eileen Patricia Curran is the author of Hungry Hill.
[0:44]She spent her earliest years in the suburbs of Springfield, Massachusetts.
[0:47]The primary setting for her debut novel Hungry Hill,
[0:50]which is named after the Irish Catholic neighborhood, her father and grandfather grew up in.
[0:54]She wanted the setting of her debut novel to be familiar to her
[0:57]and imagined what it would be like to return to the neighborhood as an adult after a personal crisis.
[1:02]She attended the University of Texas at Dallas with a BA in Economics and Finance,
[1:06]Boston College, MBA, Finance and Marketing, and the New York School of Interior Design.
[1:11]By the way, this may be why her book cover has like the most amazing wallpaper.
[1:15]What should be a wallpaper if it isn't ever.
[1:18]But anyway, she currently resides in Florida, the land of weirdness,
[1:22]where she is perpetually amazed by the local headlines.
[1:25]Welcome, Eileen.
[1:26]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone of Time to read books to discuss Hungry Hill.
[1:31]Well, it's very nice to meet you and thank you for inviting me to speak with you.
[1:36]It's my pleasure.
[1:38]So would you mind telling listeners what Hungry Hill is about and then what inspired you to write it?
[1:43]Hungry Hill is it's kind of a multi-generational story about two women.
[1:50]One is Grace Kavanaugh.
[1:52]She's a great niece to Maggie Riley, and they're both in a personal crisis,
[2:00]and they haven't seen each other year and years, but they were close decades ago.
[2:06]And the story is about how Maggie reaches out to Grace after Grace loses her husband
[2:13]and is sort of wallowing in her grief and can't seem to get beyond it.
[2:18]And Maggie convinces Grace to move in with her to help her while she is very ill with metastatic breast cancer.
[2:28]And to take care of her because Maggie is someone who never married.
[2:34]She's lived alone in the house that she grew up in.
[2:38]And Hungry Hill, which is an Irish Catholic neighborhood in the Springfield neighborhood in the Springfield area.
[2:47]And Maggie and Grace lived together and they bond and reconnect and they help each other through what they're both going through.
[2:58]And they kind of build a village people in the neighborhood to help them both with what they're dealing with.
[3:05]And I decided to write novel length fiction a few years ago.
[3:12]And I really wanted to use a setting and people that I felt like I understood and could write about.
[3:20]And my dad actually grew up in Hungry Hill, and I used to go there all the time when I was a kid.
[3:26]And I had a great aunt Catherine Curran who lived in the same house she was born in.
[3:33]And my dad was actually the third generation to live in the house and he grew up there.
[3:39]And my great aunt Catherine raised him.
[3:42]So I knew the neighborhood really well. I lived in the Springfield area when I was young.
[3:48]And I certainly knew the character Catherine Curran.
[3:53]And she was quite a piece of work. She was really somebody who was alive. She had a huge personality.
[3:59]It was very easy to draw on her personality to create a fictional character.
[4:05]And I kind of put myself in the situation of Grace Kavanaugh mentally like what would happen.
[4:11]If I lost someone who was my, you know, great love.
[4:16]And I couldn't move on. I really got stuck emotionally.
[4:21]What could I do about that.
[4:23]And she kind of gives into the idea of taking somebody taking care of somebody else to put aside her own grief.
[4:31]And to see what happens. And I just decided, okay, well, I'm going to imagine I have lost my great laws.
[4:39]I'm moving from a very posh town, Greenwich Connecticut to a very blue collar Irish Catholic neighborhood to move in with my great aunt.
[4:50]And what would that be like? What would the relationship be like?
[4:55]And how could they nurture each other? So that's why I chose the setting and chose a story.
[5:02]And are you, do you live in Greenwich?
[5:04]No, but I did for quite a long time and I'm from Connecticut.
[5:08]As an adult, I grew up in Springfield as a kid and then my family moved to Connecticut.
[5:14]And I kind of lived all the real place, Dallas, LA, Boston.
[5:19]And ended up in Connecticut for a number of years and lived in Greenwich and loved the town and thought it would make a great dichotomy for my story as I compare it to hungry hill.
[5:33]And what did it feel like to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has lost their great love?
[5:39]I mean, that is not an easy place to be emotionally.
[5:43]No, but I've had my share of loss.
[5:45]I think, you know, everybody experiences some loss and as you get older, you experience more in different types of loss.
[5:53]So it was pretty easy for me to imagine being alone, being devastated by losing somebody that I really cared about.
[6:01]And I did think from the beginning that I personally would use a lot of humor to get through it.
[6:09]So there's a lot of humor in the novel. I think people don't expect that it's really supposed to be a funny novel.
[6:17]And I get there as quickly as I can after I create the setting, I let the readers know that Grace is going through this sort of personal trauma.
[6:29]And that she's moved to hungry hill to take care of her great aunt.
[6:33]But then I tried very quickly to get into what was funny about the situation.
[6:38]I have a very funny family.
[6:40]My great aunt Catherine was hysterically funny.
[6:44]My dad was funny.
[6:46]So it was easy for me to see how people would use humor to tease each other to become intimate with each other
[6:55]other to sort of put their circumstances into a place that they could both tolerate.
[7:02]And so that's what I went with humor.
[7:06]And I mean, there's a lot of angst, but I like to think that the humor definitely mitigates it quite often in the novel.
[7:14]I feel like even as you, as you set up the setting originally and you have Maggie coming in with her giant dogs and her aunt sort of being totally taken aback and sort of headscarf on the roof like trying to clean and then this giant dog and she's like, oh my gosh, like what's she going to think about my other dog if this little dog is a problem.
[7:34]It's like a human size animal. It's an afghan or something. Right. It wasn't an afghan.
[7:39]I was both now. Yeah. Sorry.
[7:42]That's okay. That's okay. Big, big dog. Big, big dog.
[7:47]So I think, you know, there's like a playfulness to the whole thing right away and you just know the antics will ensue and what will happen with these women and you know, all of that.
[7:59]I mean, in real life, even when we go through things that are horribly traumatic, whether it's death or divorce or problems with their children, there are always things about it that are historically funny.
[8:12]And, you know, maybe not all the time, maybe they're just moments where we think, you know, there is humor in this.
[8:20]And because I personally like to focus on that and I find that that gets me through so much.
[8:26]I tried to do a lot of setups for some warm, soft humor and the dogs for me were very important.
[8:35]I'm very much a dog person and they all have their personalities and they're just like people and it was pretty easy to take the two dogs.
[8:45]I've been hungry hill with and give them personalities that help support the relationship between the great aunt and the great knees.
[8:55]And I really, I, you know, a lot of the way I wrote was very organic.
[9:01]So I didn't really realize until I was getting into the story that Maggie and Stobe who's the mud would become very close and inseparable really and how much that would mean to Maggie.
[9:16]And that Ellen who's the Wolfhound would become a pulmonary influence for everybody that she was just this steady suite could nature force.
[9:31]And so I use those as mechanisms just sort of take things down an notch or make things more intimate and to bridge the gap between grace and Maggie.
[9:42]Do you have kids, how old are your kids.
[9:44]I have one son and he's 24 so you know I can tell you as mother of a grown son that it does get quieter and easier over time and one certainly is easier than four.
[9:58]children are.
[10:00]So, you know, they take effort and work to raise and yeah.
[10:06]It actually wasn't until my son was out of the house.
[10:10]He was awarding a school that I really started to write
[10:13]because for me, I'm just a very, very busy person
[10:18]and to clear the headspace that it takes to write
[10:21]to focus to really think about how I want to write
[10:25]and what I want to write.
[10:27]I can't have huge distractions.
[10:30]So it actually took me quite a long time to write hungry.
[10:33]Hell, I wrote sort of the first draft
[10:37]and finished maybe three or four years ago
[10:39]and then I worked with a professional editor.
[10:43]And then I really spent two years just learning
[10:46]how to write fiction properly,
[10:49]which, you know, even though I'm an avid reader
[10:52]and have read hundreds of novels,
[10:54]it's still different when you sit down
[10:57]and there are all of these rules to follow
[11:00]and things to think about and so I love that process.
[11:05]I loved learning how to write
[11:07]because my background is actually in finance and marketing.
[11:10]So it didn't come as naturally to me
[11:13]as someone who has an MFA or who's, you know,
[11:17]degree in creative writing, but it was a lot of fun.
[11:22]And I really had the time when COVID came along
[11:25]to, you know, kind of clear the decks
[11:29]and figure out what I wanted to do
[11:31]with my finished manuscript.
[11:34]So that was more fun than writing than I will probably
[11:38]trying to figure out the whole publishing process
[11:41]and how to put, I wanted to do it myself.
[11:44]So just to have creative control over everything was a joy.
[11:48]I really loved it.
[11:50]And there's, you know, so many resources right now
[11:53]to writers if they really want to self publish,
[11:57]you can find really talented people to work with.
[12:00]And fortunately, I found just wonderful interior book designers
[12:06]and book cover designers and had a lot of fun
[12:09]with all of that.
[12:10]My background is also in design.
[12:13]So all of that was probably, like I said,
[12:17]as much fun as writing a novel.
[12:19]I have to say, I love how it looks.
[12:21]I was, I was literally looking at the other day
[12:23]and I was trying to analyze like, what is it?
[12:25]I love so much about the cover.
[12:27]You know, what is it?
[12:27]Is it the font?
[12:28]Like, would it be the same if it didn't have
[12:30]these little florishes on the bottom of the, of the letters?
[12:33]Like, all these things are decisions.
[12:35]So on Sarah, yeah, we learned about that.
[12:38]And think about that.
[12:39]I wanted it to look quite modern, but not too modern.
[12:42]So when you pile of lawns, yeah, it doesn't,
[12:46]it does not look self published at all.
[12:49]Well, thank you.
[12:51]Many self published books have a similar,
[12:53]well, first of all, a lot of them are paperback, I would say.
[12:55]So how did you go about choosing who to,
[12:58]which service even to use?
[13:00]And then I want to go back to teaching yourself
[13:02]how to write a novel in two years
[13:03]because that's also so fascinating.
[13:05]Well, you know, print on demand is a fairly new thing
[13:09]and the biggest name in the industry is Ingram's Park.
[13:13]So I looked at them and I was more concerned about quality.
[13:18]Yeah, really than anything.
[13:20]Although I knew ultimately,
[13:22]eBooks would be more important to me than anything.
[13:26]I, for the most part,
[13:27]all of these beautiful little hardcover versions
[13:31]are either gifts to people or the people that I know
[13:37]that love the way it looks have ordered them,
[13:39]but the vast majority of sales that I've had have been eBooks.
[13:44]So you kind of miss out on the experience
[13:46]of the beautiful hardcover novel,
[13:49]but I still like you.
[13:50]I love actual real books.
[13:53]You know, I read on my iPad all the time
[13:56]when I travel, if I'm gonna be reading at night.
[13:59]So I use it a lot,
[14:01]but if I really love the novel,
[14:04]sometimes I buy it in hardcover version
[14:07]just so I can go back, read it again, make notes,
[14:11]think about it.
[14:12]So I thought I really wanted a beautiful hardcover novel.
[14:16]And it's pretty easy to find quality printers right now.
[14:21]And Ingram Spark is definitely one of them.
[14:24]We're using Ingram.
[14:25]I started a publishing business
[14:27]that I announced last month or two months ago.
[14:29]Yeah.
[14:30]Yeah.
[14:31]Excited for you.
[14:32]Thank you.
[14:33]We're distributing through Ingram,
[14:35]but we're not printing there, but that's interesting.
[14:37]Oh, okay.
[14:38]So you're distributing.
[14:39]Yeah.
[14:40]What's happening through them?
[14:41]Yeah, I mean, they've got a great network for sure.
[14:45]Libraries, bookstores, you name it.
[14:48]Is that how you distribute?
[14:50]Like, did they distribute your book or do they do that?
[14:51]Yeah.
[14:52]They didn't for you.
[14:53]Right.
[14:54]I think the first time I Googled my novel,
[14:58]it was kind of before the official launch date,
[15:01]which was June 1st of this last summer.
[15:04]It was already selling somewhere in Australia.
[15:07]What?
[15:08]No way.
[15:09]That's what I said, what?
[15:11]But they send out notices to everybody on the planet.
[15:16]I mean, they're a global company.
[15:17]Right.
[15:18]And anybody anywhere can order your novel
[15:22]if you sign up for that marketing package for them.
[15:25]So it's pretty cool.
[15:26]I really enjoy that.
[15:28]And they put it in bookstores for you as well.
[15:30]If a bookstore orders it, absolutely.
[15:33]Yeah.
[15:34]That's great.
[15:35]This is great to know for people interested in stuff.
[15:37]Right.
[15:38]It's there's so much to learn,
[15:41]but it's a really fun, creative business.
[15:45]And there are so many aspects to it that require
[15:48]that you really get up to speed with technology.
[15:51]And you have to do a lot of research about how
[15:55]to go forward with creating something.
[15:58]But I found it really, really enjoyable.
[16:00]So how did you market, how do you market?
[16:04]I think one thing people think is that by going
[16:07]with the traditional publisher, you get all the services
[16:10]associated with that publicity.
[16:11]And marketing and all of that.
[16:12]How do you do it successfully when you're in charge?
[16:16]Only yourself.
[16:17]It's obviously much harder.
[16:19]I don't have the resources of a major publishing
[16:23]house behind me.
[16:25]So I've had to learn how to do everything, which
[16:27]was something I wanted to do anyway.
[16:30]So I hired a marketing professional
[16:33]who was in publishing for many years.
[16:36]And I hired a PR guy who was in publishing for many years.
[16:41]And they have both worked with me to teach me
[16:44]about how to market.
[16:46]And actually, we're all kind of learning together
[16:50]at the same time about some things.
[16:52]Like Zoom is a pretty new thing for doing interviews
[16:56]and posting on Instagram and all of that.
[16:59]So some things were learning together.
[17:01]But there are so many digital resources for writers.
[17:05]It helped to have professionals show me
[17:08]how to use them and manage a lot of it for me.
[17:11]So I've had to kind of build a team.
[17:15]But it's possible to do it as an individual.
[17:18]I started my own little imprint.
[17:21]It's not exactly.
[17:22]One book in one coming, one in the pipe, my next novel.
[17:26]Oh, that's your name.
[17:27]Well, I've been at Florida for 10 years now.
[17:30]Has it been that long?
[17:31]Maybe a little longer.
[17:33]And coming from New England to Florida was a real shock.
[17:37]And I was originally on the east coast of Florida,
[17:40]which is where most people from the east coast
[17:43]of the country go to.
[17:45]Then I ended up moving to the Orlando area.
[17:48]But I have to say Florida is the weirdest melting pot
[17:53]on the planet.
[17:54]There's so much going on on a daily basis
[17:58]that is just off the church.
[18:00]You would never see this stuff happening in Connecticut.
[18:02]New York is a little different.
[18:03]You see everything in New York.
[18:05]But I decided that it would be fun to write a Florida-based
[18:09]novel.
[18:10]And I love Carl Heisen.
[18:13]He's someone who's written satire about Florida
[18:17]for a long time.
[18:18]He was born and raised to Miami.
[18:20]And I thought it would be fun to move in that direction
[18:25]as far as a genre is concerned, because I prefer the humor
[18:28]anyway.
[18:29]And it comes more naturally to me.
[18:32]And I like to research.
[18:34]So I thought it would be really fun to do
[18:36]a sort of murder mystery, where I put myself
[18:40]in the shoes of the protagonist, who just
[18:43]happens to be a Connecticut transplant,
[18:46]in a fictional town in Florida.
[18:49]And she buys a bar in a little motel
[18:54]and just gets involved in a really weird murder.
[18:59]So that, for me, has been a lot of fun,
[19:01]because I've just, instead of trying to do the angst
[19:05]and the intimacy and all those things that are really
[19:08]loved when writing Hungry Hill.
[19:10]I mean, it really made me think about who I am as a person
[19:15]and how I wanted people to treat me and how I would like
[19:19]to treat people.
[19:20]That's kind of what Hungry Hill was an exercise in.
[19:24]How to be decent.
[19:26]How to be a kind and decent person.
[19:29]So actually, everybody in the novel
[19:32]has to be kind and decent.
[19:33]I made them that way, which is nice to have that kind
[19:36]of control.
[19:37]The Gatorland is just a little bit more of a free-for-all.
[19:40]Have I found Gatorland?
[19:42]Yeah.
[19:44]Anyway, I am enjoying that, although I have to say I'm
[19:48]spending more time on Hungry Hill right now
[19:51]than I am on Gatorland.
[19:52]So eventually, I'll sit down and start pounding the keys
[19:55]and adding to my new novel.
[19:57]Well, I love it.
[19:58]You've essentially done what I'm doing.
[20:00]You started now, obviously company and that's pretty awesome. You could just start bringing
[20:03]another authors and doing the same. I could. I really could. I don't know if I want to work
[20:07]as hard as you were. I, I mean, I, I love it. I almost would just give it away. You know,
[20:15]I just, it was so much fun. And I had such a great time. And these, here are all the great people
[20:20]I've been working with. And yeah, I really do enjoy that. And I think it would be much easier
[20:27]right now to help somebody through the process because I work so hard to understand it
[20:33]and make it work for me. So I'm sure that you're going to enjoy it very much.
[20:38]Yes, but maybe I'll have you come like talk to your authors or something because, you know,
[20:43]it's so interesting. The experience you've had, it's a very unique, not unique. I mean,
[20:47]I guess it is a very specific experience. Right. Well, I'd love to do that. I mean, it's really
[20:54]is enjoyable. If you approached it with the idea that you want to learn something, you want to
[21:01]grow as a person and you want to create something exceptional. Yep. It's a great process.
[21:08]Do you know the author Deborah Royce by any chance? I know the name. I don't know if I've read
[21:13]anything by her. I feel like I need to introduce the two of you. I think I just feel like you'd have
[21:18]a lot to chat with. Yeah, I don't know. I think you would pick her out. I think you guys would have
[21:23]a nice lunch. I would like to join it. It was so great. But that sounds amazing. So after going
[21:31]through this whole thing, I'm very curious as to what advice you have from, yes, the writing side,
[21:37]but also from the business side and taking your finance marketing brain and what you feel that
[21:43]authors really should know as they're getting into this. I think anybody approaching novel
[21:50]fiction has got to understand that it's not easy that there's a pretty steep learning curve.
[21:58]There's a lot of editing involved. Unless you come out of school with an MFA and you've been writing
[22:04]for years in college undergrad and grad, which is a lot of people out there. But most of those people
[22:13]already have the tool set. If you don't already have the tool set, you really need to teach yourself
[22:19]and you need to read a lot of books about writing and to plow through the Chicago manual book
[22:27]book of style. I spent a lot of time researching online. What do I do in this situation? What's the
[22:36]best way to transition or how do I stay intense? What if I want to mix my tenses or I want to do
[22:45]this or I want to do that? You have to educate yourself as a writer and it probably helps to
[22:51]have a professional editor that I highly recommend. Someone who can say, you know, this is not working
[22:57]because and they don't have to write for you and they don't have to tell you how to write,
[23:02]they can just help you with mechanics. I was glad that I did that. Then in terms of the financial
[23:10]aspects of writing, I would say you really have to expect to spend money to launch yourself as a
[23:17]writer. If you want to do it well, it's not an inexpensive proposition. You need to have a website
[23:24]that looks beautiful. You need to have somebody manage it. If that's not your in your wheelhouse,
[23:30]you have to decide if you want to find an agent and I did work with a couple of them and that
[23:38]process can be lengthy to find an agent and then you have to go through the process of deciding
[23:44]do you want to work with a publishing house that will have a lot of control over the final product.
[23:51]And for a lot of people, I think that's fine. I think if you can find a publisher
[23:57]and they want to work with you, that's probably the easiest route to go. There's, you know,
[24:02]in terms of cost, that's certainly a whole different animal. But I think if you really,
[24:09]really love to have control over every aspect of your writing, I highly recommend self-publishing.
[24:15]But it's not inexpensive. And if you really want things to look good, I think hungry hell
[24:21]is a pretty novel because I work to people who knew what they were doing, who could advise me
[24:27]and work with me and help my creative vision look professional. So it's not inexpensive if you
[24:35]want to self-publish. You can certainly team up. There's so many people now who are creating,
[24:41]creating their own imprints. I would recommend doing that, teaming up with someone who's already done
[24:47]it, who knows what they're doing, who has a different cost structure and who is someone who's
[24:54]is looking for writers. And you probably in that situation, I don't know, you could speak to this
[24:59]better than I can. You probably have more creative control in that kind of situation too, where
[25:06]if you're working with a smaller imprint, but they already have a marketing track. They know what
[25:12]they're doing. They know how to get you up and running. They know how to support you, but they're a
[25:17]smaller imprint. You probably would have more control, yes. Probably. I don't know. Probably.
[25:26]But again, it's not inexpensive. It's a lot of work, but it can certainly be worth the effort.
[25:33]Love it. Well, I might follow up with you after this podcast for resource recommendations or
[25:39]things that you thought were amazing. So, well, I would love that. It's been a lot of fun. Great.
[25:45]Well, bravo to you. I mean, this is a total, you know, Eileen production here. So,
[25:51]hats off for making this beautiful book. It must feel amazing to hold it in your hands and
[25:56]how that you had everything to do with every little piece of it. And that it came out really,
[26:00]really, really well. It's really great. It's very kind of you to say that I appreciate it.
[26:05]It's really true. All right. Okay. Well, thank you so much. It was great to meet you.
[26:09]My passion was nice to meet you. We'll be, we'll stay in touch.
[26:14]Thank you very much. And good luck with your son. Thank you so much.
[26:17]That'll be very soon. Kind of jealous.
[26:22]Kind of. What is good? Okay. We'll have a lovely day. You too. Bye-bye.
[26:29]Thank you, Zippy. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:35]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[26:40]Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zippyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[26:45]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[26:50]for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[26:54]fantastic intro and outro music.