Caleb Nickerson
SHAWVILLE Aug. 12, 2017
On Saturday, Café 349 played host to a book signing by an author with local roots.
“My family has a cottage in Norway Bay. I grew up coming up to Norway Bay every summer,” said Shannon Mullen, a high school teacher hailing from Toronto who had her debut novel See What Flowers on display.
She described her work as a contemporary fiction about love and mental illness. Told through alternating narratives – similar to the New York Times bestseller Gone Girl – the story begins with a man named Adam who wakes up in jail in Vancouver and is not sure how he got there. Together with his partner Emma in Toronto, they have to piece together what happened.
Mullen said some of the themes explored in the book were inspired by her time teaching in the far north.
“I was working up north in the Arctic and there the suicide rates are ten times the national average,” she said. “The consequences, or the tragedies of mental illness were really in my face and I had gone through some training to recognize mental illness in my students. The idea of mental illness was on my mind a lot. I had never really been exposed to it before that, but in the Arctic, it’s very prominent.”
“When I came back home, a couple of my friends were in relationships that were being affected by mental illness, particularly depression in men,” she continued. “The novel came from all those things.”
Mullen wrote the first draft of the novel over a six month period after she returned to Toronto from the north.
“It was a time where I couldn’t get a teaching job in Ontario so I said ok I’m going to give myself about eight months to really sit down and try to write a book,” she explained. “The first draft took me about six months with about a year of editing and revisions.”
Even after all this effort, she still had to overcome one of the biggest challenges for aspiring authors: finding a publisher.
“I spent about a year submitting to traditional publishers, not really knowing what I was doing,” she said. “I was getting a bit frustrated. I decided I was just going to publish it.”
Using Amazon’s Create Space, Mullen went ahead and put the book out herself near the end of May this year. Despite the freedom of self-authoring, Mullen said that it comes with its own set of challenges.
“The problem with self-publishing is that you have to do all the marketing yourself and I’m not really good at selling myself,” she said.
Though this is her first novel, Mullen is no stranger to writing.
“I’ve taught in England and Columbia and in the Arctic,” she said. “I have a blog where I’ve been writing about my experiences. I just love writing.”
Copies of See What Flowers can be found at Café 349 in Shawville or online at Amazon.ca.
