Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 90 NOVEMBER 2020 I N - D E P T H David Moloney is the author of Barker House. Chicken wing delivery man. Landscaper. Bartender. Bouncer. And now author. David Moloney's worked myriad odd jobs but perhaps the most thought-provoking was his time working as a corrections officer in southern New Hampshire, which inspired his first novel. Barker House, a collection of wry, pensive short stories reminiscent of Olive Kitteridge—a collection praised by that book's Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, no less—was released this spring during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and swirling tensions over law enforcement. But for Moloney's characters, and himself, corrections has a lot of gray area. "I try to show there's sometimes not that much difference between orange and brown," he says of prisoners' jumpsuits and his former uniform. "Some inmates I met were really good people and made a mistake. And some officers do shady stuff and probably shouldn't be working there. A lot of [inmates] were accused of something they didn't do, and others were too dangerous to be out in public." It's been almost 10 years since Moloney served on a unit, although he still wakes up exhausted after dreaming of working a shift. The prison guard experience is different from an oft-romanticized view of police officers and prisoners, he says, and there are few fictional portraits of those who watch the incarcerated after the boys in blue are done with them. Serving as just one of two guards assigned to 92 prisoners per unit was one of the reasons Moloney was inspired to portray "what is a Lowell author is inspired by time as corrections off icer—and work with UMass mentor Andre Dubus III—for f irst book. BY CARLEY D. THORNELL DAVID MOLONEY, UNGUARDED PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DAVID MOLONEY