Clare O'Brien

About me:

I'm a pro writer, musician, freelance jack-of-all-trades, crofter's wife and mother of two based in the Scottish Highlands. Pleased to meet you. As well as keeping animals and helping to grow our own organic fruit and veg, I earn some of my bread-and-butter as a feature-writer and reviewer and have published many hundreds of feature articles, interview and reviews. However - I'm really happier writing fiction, PR copy and biography. I'm currently in the final stages of editing a book of short stories provisionally titled Thin Places: Modern Slipstream Fiction From The Highlands and I've already published a non-fiction book about my old home town of London, as well as various short stories and poetry in small-press magazines and anthologies.

Some of the people I've interviewed include the abovementioned Chris Cornell and his guitarist Yogi Lonich, writer and activist Ariel Dorfman, movie producer Peter Lord of Aardman Animations, ex-Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons, producer Steve Lillywhite, literary novelists Jeanette Winterson and Peter Carey, punk frontman Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers, guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas and young British artist Martin Grech, Latin/metal crossover band Ill Nino, fantasy writer China Mieville, soul legend Sam Moore and my ex-boss, conductor Stephen Cleobury, director of the choir of King's College, Cambridge.

To see a selection of my published work, or to explore my writer's website, go here - or read some of my reviews at Amazon. You can also read an expanded, unedited version of my MySpace blog (with more fiction and poetry!) at my Blogger site, Breathing Out Becomes White And Snowfall.

I'm currently looking for more PAID writing work, so if you have any, please get in touch!

I'm also a musician. I started off with classical flute and various youth choirs and orchestras, and I still have a strong interest in classical music - I even spent a while working as assistant to Stephen Cleobury, the Director of Music at King's College, Cambridge, in England, helping with all the admin and PR work surrounding the world-famous choir. In the 80s and 90s I played keyboards in a rock band with an indie deal and played flute in a world music outfit playing middle eastern rap/crossover music.

These days I'm in Scotland-based music collective Species 8472, so if you're a musician or a band please consider adding the band instead of me!! Makes much more sense. I write most of the lyrics, a little of the music and sing and play a bit. Although we're based in the Scottish Highlands, we use the net to the full. So far, guest appearances on other Species 8472 songs have included a Russian singer, a guitarist from Oxford and spoken word from a lady in Chicago!

I'm also currently singing in Black Cherry, a live covers band which mixes and reinvents jazz standards and folksong using voice, piano, harp and flute.



Still on the subject of music, I run the Chris Cornell Fan Page which is an independent resource covering Chris's solo career - a one-stop site collecting news, reviews, current tour dates, interviews and much more. A new album, "Scream", is out from Chris soon. See his tour dates and ticket availability here.

I also work as an internet researcher for a company called AQA (Any Question Answered) and through my band Species 8472 I have a track on their new musical project The AQA Greatest Questions Album. It's called Can You Cry Under Water? and although it's based around one of the trivia questions AQA gets asked, I wrote the lyrics as a sideways look at the changes global warming might bring, with a cryptic reference to AQA at the end. Check it out!

On a more local level, together with my husband and sons I help run a tourism and organic horticulture business on the croft where we live and work.





We also help run West Coast Arts, which puts on touring theatre and concerts of all kinds in the western Highlands.