BELFAST man Mark Mullan has been helping the afflicted for many years as a chiropractor, but it was only when he suffered a serious injury himself that the 32-year-old decided to finally pursue his passion for creative writing.
“I had quite a major surgery about four years ago,” explains Mullan, who qualified at the Welsh Institute of Chiropractic and practised in London for several years before travelling the world and then returning home to work in Belfast.
“I used to play badminton and rugby. I never had a bad injury playing rugby, but then I got hurt bad enough playing badminton that I needed surgery and had to learn to walk again afterwards.
“That certainly fed into me having a proper good crack at the writing. After I had the surgery, we had one of the [Covid] lockdowns, so not only could I not leave my house, I couldn’t actually do anything.
“It was either sit and play PlayStation all day, or play PlayStation for half the day and write for the other half.”
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Indeed, it was during Covid that Mullan cranked out his debut novel – although it won’t be coming to a bookshop near you until it undergoes a major re-write.
He tells me: “I was like, ‘Right, I’m ready to write a novel’. And then I wrote it, and it was s***. And I went, ‘You know what? I need to go and study how to do this’.”
Currently enrolled in a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast, Mullan is now one of the lucky students to have a short story selected for broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster’s Storytellers series, which platforms short fiction by new writers.
Even better, the tale is to be given voice by Co Antrim actor Seamus O’Hara, star of Blue Lights and the Oscar-winning An Irish Goodbye.
In the story, a mother and son drive from Belfast to Tyrone to visit the river where the mother’s sister drowned when they were both young children. As Mullan explains, this is based on a real life tragedy which cast a shadow over his family for many years – despite never being discussed.
“My mother’s earliest memory is of her sister drowning when she was three,” he tells me.
“It’s something my family suffered with immensely before I ever existed. But I didn’t know about any of it until I was into my 20s. And it wasn’t until I was about 30 that my grandma was suddenly like, ‘Do you want to go see her grave?’.
“Afterwards, I spoke to Mum about it and found out the massive effect it had on her – it’s like her prevailing childhood memory. So then I had this strange luxury of kind of interviewing my mum and being like, ‘What do you remember?’ And it’s all in the story, in her own words.
“Essentially, this is just a true story with about 10 per cent artistic license.”
While Mullan describes the process of researching and writing Swimming Lessons for Butterflies – which was developed via weekly writing workshops at QUB’s Seamus Heaney Centre – as “therapeutic”, he does admit to having mixed feelings about sharing such a deeply personal tale.
“The personal aspect of it was actually a bit of a torture,” explains the author, who has written a short film which is currently in development.
“I wrote the initial version and I was like, ‘This is wonderful. I’ve transmuted something, it’s authentic’. And then I went ‘f*** – do I put this out into the world?’.
“I spoke about it a bit [with my family], whether they were happy with it being out to the world. We spoke about it being a remembrance of my aunt. If anything, my grandparents were quite glad, because it means a little bit of immortality for her.
“Also, a big part of the story is this idea of like, if she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be alive. So without trauma, my existence wouldn’t have come to pass. And I’ve had difficult feelings about that.
“But, I think if you’re serious about being a writer, you kind of have to write authentically, because there will be other people who’ve had similar experiences with these kind of intergenerational traumas.
“If it helps them interpret their own lives or understand themselves a bit better, that’s great.”
As for his ‘late blooming’ career as a writer, Mullan says he’s glad to have taken a circuitous route.
“I did about six years with the chiropractic when I first went to London after I graduated,” explains the author, a former pupil at Methodist College Belfast.
“Throughout that time, I started writing poetry and essays. I enjoyed both as a means of starting to express myself a bit more, because in school I didn’t have a great time with the English literature stuff – I was a ‘straight sciences’ kind of kid.
“But in hindsight, I do love having a professional job. Chiropractic is the kind of profession where, although you’ll never be rich, you can’t be poor unless you’re s*** at the job.
“There is a comfort to that: a lot of people who go straight into the arts have to do the whole ‘starving artist’ thing.”
And, as Mullan explains, having Swimming Lessons for Butterflies narrated by a talent like Seamus O’Hara more than makes up for the disappointment of not being allowed to perform it himself.
“I was told I didn’t have the voice for radio,” he reveals.
“I actually met Seamus when he came to visit the Seamus Heaney Centre, and I asked him to sign a copy of the story. I told him ‘I wrote this and you’ve read it – thank you so much’. He was absolutely lovely and we ended up having a couple of beers.
“I even got chatting to his parents, who told me all about their chiropractor.”
