I spent my twenties working in juvenile residential homes, mental hospitals, and a county jail. During that time, I wrote constantly—journals, stories, notes—keeping the muscles loose, even if the writing went nowhere. After my wife became pregnant, I left the jail and returned to school, planning to become a high school English teacher. But college writing workshops wouldn’t let me abandon the dream I couldn’t deny: being a writer.
I write without a plan or outline. I begin by reading what I wrote the day before and follow my curiosity, letting my characters guide me. I watch them stumble, fail, and sometimes find what they seek. On the page, I preserve the parts of myself that resist schedules and checklists, the parts that chase wonder and surprise in ordinary life.
This approach shaped Barker House and carries into my forthcoming novel, Lion in Love, set in Lowell, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Merrimack River. In that city, I return to the streets, the corners, the lives of people pushed to the margins, letting their stories unfold in ways only fiction allows.
David Moloney is the author of Barker House (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the forthcoming novel Lion in Love (Regal House, Spring 2027). His work has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, The Yale Review, Joyland, The Common, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. He is the coordinator of Southern New Hampshire University’s undergraduate creative writing program and teaches at The Mountainview MFA, where he also attended. He is a native of Lowell, MA, the city in which Lion in Love is set.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you David Moloney’s Lion in Love in the spring of 2027.
