About the Author Stephen Burke
The Brief Version
The author Stephen Burke grew up in Boston, MA. While earning his MFA as a Graduate Writing Felllow at Columbia University, he looked back to those early years in writing his thesis project. It eventually became his first novel—The Chieftains of South Boston. It’s a tale of three Mahoney brothers, and explores sense of place and how it can shape a person’s destiny.
Stephen later published The Mahoneys of West Seattle. Set in Seattle during the dot com era, it’s a sequel that follows the lives of Matthew Mahoney, Anne Boushay and their two children.
In 2022, he moved to Ipswich, MA, to reacquaint himself with the area and to volunteer on a farm. That experience informs his next novel, Ipswich, Mon Amour. It’s the third book in a series. Stephen Burke currently lives in Boise, ID.
Since You Asked…
Here’s a longer version. My story begins in Boston, where I grew up. To be specific, in the Dorchester section, a few blocks away from Ashmont Station at the southern end of the Red Line on the T. I took that train back and forth to Boston Latin during the crazy time of school desegregation.
I never really thought about being a writer back then. Nor during my years at Colby College. It was after I graduated and started working in the world of business. Something didn’t quite feel right about the direction my life was taking.
So I left that track and went searching for another. After a short spell of wandering, I found writing. I describe that process of discovery here. I started writing groups in Boston, and later Seattle, before earning an MFA at Columbia University.
Grad school taught me a lot, but it didn’t make me an author. That would come with the completion of my first novel, The Chieftains of South Boston. It was a project I began at Columbia, then put aside for several years. I picked it up again after a bad cycling accident that earned me my first ride in the back of an ambulance.
The accident demonstrated, in a visceral way, that my life could end at any moment. Had I died that day, I would have done so without finishing even one book. For years, I’d been telling myself that writing was the most important thing to me.
I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I quit my job as a copywriter and worked full time on the story.
The Chieftains of South Boston
I wrote seven days a week, twice a day at different cafes in Seattle, and fought my way through the first draft. It was difficult and painful, but also exhilarating. The novel is 400 pages long. I wrote about a thousand pages to get there. It required lots and lots of editing.
Writing that first book was the only way I could learn how to write a novel. Before I accepted that fact, there was a lot of avoidance, a lot of time wasted looking for a way to write my novel without putting in the real work. I know I’m not the first writer to look for an easier trail up the mountain.
I feel like I accomplished my goals in that first story. Among them were: writing a piece of historical fiction that captured the time in which I grew up; creating an intense drama that engaged several genres, including murder mystery, suspense and thriller, while being captive to none; expressing the insoluble personal conundrum of trying to be loyal to the culture that shaped me while maintaining faith in a moral code that sprang from the same source.
That last one is reflected in the character Matthew Mahoney. In the course of the novel, he stumbles his way through a hall of mirrors, where acts of intended loyalty end up as acts of betrayal. He struggles to find a way out, but his efforts are in vain.
The Mahoneys of West Seattle
My second novel, I decided, would be a sequel. Some of the same characters but a different kind of story. Instead of Boston politics and the Irish Mafia, it would be a family tale set in Seattle during the dot com boom and bust. The story focuses a family struggling in the ways a typical family does on the road to the American Dream.
I decide to self-published The Mahoneys of West Seattle because I wasn’t sure how readers would receive it. The story was new territory for me. I also didn’t want to spend a lot of time and energy pitching the manuscript to literary agents. I wanted to plunge into my third book, and I already knew where the story would go.
Ipswich, Mon Amour
It would be another sequel in the series, another family tale, but one that explored different themes, a complex web of them. They range from the tension between fulfilling family expectations versus shaping one’s own destiny, to the world of death and how our unconscious, through mythology, still guides us in understanding and experiencing the relationship between our temporal existence and what might be called our eternal selves.
When I finished the first draft of Ipswich, Mon Amour, I felt good about it. Only then did I begin researching traditional publishing. Over the course of a year, I reached out to dozens of agents without any luck. There’s more about that process here (link to follow).
When the last rejection arrived, I felt free to move ahead and put the book out there myself. Self-publishing comes with a lot of associated tasks, like rounds of copy editing, building an online presence for the novel, having a cover designed, managing the marketing and advertising. That’s all been my focus for the last several months.
As of May, 2025, I’m looking at possibilities for the next book. They include a fourth novel in what I’m calling the Mahoney series, and a few other notions that would be a big departure from that world.
My Writing Style
Some people have asked me about my writing style. Readers have also weighed in with different opinions.
In brief, I describe it as immersive. My goal is to put the reader into the experience of the story as much as possible. I’d also describe it as cinematic, using scene-by-scene construction. More showing, less telling.
One of my influences is Denis Johnson, specifically his book Jesus’ Son. It taught me about poetic density, and how to make a narrative move quickly while maintaining richness of meaning and depth of emotion. And there are so many more writers I’m indebted to for what their work has taught me.
To read about the making of Ipswich, Mon Amour, check out these posts:
Death and Mythology in the Novel
Scenes in Paris and Southern France