Mourning Dove

It’s been a long process to this announcement: My Southern family saga, Mourning Dove, which is set in Memphis, is now available for pre-order on Amazon, with the scheduled release date of  June 29, 2018 for the print, ebook, and audiobook, which I had a blast narrating. My publisher, Firefly Southern Fiction, did the unusual and let me narrate Mourning Dove because I kept saying the book needed a Memphis accent.  I have that in spades, and the good news is I have a nine year radio career behind me, so wearing headphones in a recording studio felt like putting on my favorite hat.

It’s been a year and two months from the day I signed the contract with Firefly Southern Fiction. I believe I’ve told this story before, but it verges on the miraculous on how I came to align with the imprint of Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolina’s, dedicated to Southern fiction.  I did everything wrong. I missed the fine print and submitted without an agent. The acquisitions editor, Eva Marie Everson, is the compassionate sort. She thought she’d write to tell me to come back with an agent, but first she wanted to get a handle on to whom she was writing. The story, as Eva tells it, is that she read a few lines then couldn’t quit reading. Ten AM on a Saturday morning, and this Southern belle called me all atwitter. The upshot is that she called the inimitable Julie Gwinn of the Seymour Literary Agency, read her the first three pages over the phone, and we’ve been a team ever since. I couldn’t be more grateful.

Mourning Dove sings the praises of the bond between siblings growing up in a Southern culture they came to as outsiders. It started as a poem and turned into a short story awarded the runner-up position in the San Francisco Writers Conference’s 2013 contest. At the time I told myself that if anything ever came of the story, I’d buckle down and turn it into a novel.

Here is Mourning Dove’s book description:

The heart has a home when it has an ally– If Millie Crossan doesn’t know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, eighteen months her senior, becomes Millie’s guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie’s tenth birthday.

Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother’s upbringing and vastly different from anything they’ve ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn’t gold. Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley’s world as they find their way to belonging.

But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?

Here is a very brief excerpt to give you a sense of its tone:

My mother’s friends had known each other from birth and coexisted like threads in a fabric. They started families together, sent their children to the same schools they attended, and set up their Cloisonné lives in congruent patterns of neat inclusivity. They threw dinner parties in stately homes, on tables set with inherited Francis I, polished to a shine by the help. In my mother’s Memphis, the conversation stayed pleasant and light over lingering cocktails, until dinner was served by a staff that dropped their own lives in deference to their employers. At an age where many women have seen their crescendo, my mother had only started to come into her beauty. She had the kind of looks that waited in arrested development during her youth, then pounced like a cat around the time she turned forty. With the passage of time followed by motherhood, her long limbs, flat chest, and slightly recessive chin filled out to capacity. Her face displayed sharp cheekbones that balanced her chin to a perfect heart-shape, and earned her a self-confidence she wore with sparkling alacrity. But a woman in possession of unique beauty and charm was in a precarious predicament in 1970s Memphis. There was always the dilemma of where to seat her at a dinner party, and without an escort to take the edge off of feminine rivalry, she was easily held in contempt.

No, that position was not for her, and my mother—as a master of networking—knew exactly what to do. She acclimated herself to the women in town, joined the Garden Club and the Junior League, lunched at the Memphis Country Club, played bridge, and hosted sip-n-sees. It wasn’t long before the dates started rolling in, though she should have issued a red-flag warning that read: Ladies, hide your husbands. Posey’s back in town.

Here are Mourning Dove’s back cover blurbs:

“Like sitting in a parlor and catching up on the trials and tragedies of the reader’s own extended Southern family.”
– Kirkus Review

“A wise and brilliantly evocative Southern tale enhanced by Claire Fullerton’s inimitable wit. Indulge in this eloquent exploration of colorful and complex family dynamics.”

Gary Fearon
Creative Director of Southern Writers Magazine

“Set against the backdrop of a complicated 1970s South – one both forward-looking and still in love with the past – and seen through the eyes of a Minnesota girl struggling to flourish in Memphis society, ‘Mourning Dove’ is the story of two unforgettable siblings with a bond so strong even death can’t break it. Claire Fullerton has given us a wise, relatable narrator in Millie. Like a trusted friend, she guides us through the confounding tale of her dazzling brother Finley, their beguiling mother Posey, and a town where shiny surfaces often belie reality. Like those surfaces, Fullerton’s prose sparkles even as she leads us into dark places, posing profound questions without any easy answers.”
Margaret Evans

Editor, Lowcountry Weekly
Former Assistant Editor of Pat Conroy

“Claire Fullerton knows how to get a voice going. I’m talking distinctive, authoritative, original as all get out. Narrator Millie Crossan will grab you by your high-ball-holding hand and set you down in privileged Memphis with her family and not let you go. Get ready for the Crossan layers to be peeled back and universal struggles exposed.”

Bren McClain
Author of One Good Mama Bone

“Every sentence tells a complete story in and of itself. A rare accomplishment by any writer! What an excellent novel — put it on your Must Read List for 2018! Millie tells the story of her brother Finley, life in the South and the anguish and joy of growing up in an eclectic and ever-changing household with rare poetic prose. Such a wonderful book.”

Valerie MacEwan, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature

“In Mourning Dove, Claire Fullerton deftly weaves the story of a Memphis family into a fine fabric laden with delicious intricacy and heart. A true Southern storyteller.”
–Laura Lane McNeal, Bestselling author of DOLLBABY

With a June 29 release, Mourning Dove is available for Pre-Order in Print and on Kindle: