Briefly tell us about your book.
The Wonderful Thing About Phoenix Rose is an uplifting and moving tale of one neurodivergent teacher’s commitment to honour a dying friend’s wishes, while road-tripping from Tasmania to Brisbane with a van full of animals and a colourful companion sharing the journey, all while racing the clock to save her job.
What inspired the idea behind this book?
Books always come at me from several directions at once. Sometimes it’s a character here, an interesting issue over there, and a landscape or location I’m inspired to write about. In this case, I had long wanted to write a road trip story. My previous book, The Jam Queens, was predominantly set on The Ghan while my family of characters took the train journey from Darwin down to Adelaide. I enjoyed that journey and I was keen to take new characters a road trip next. The second place it came from was my love of animals. All my books have had an animal character in them but I really wanted to supersize that aspect and thought a road trip with a van full of animals would lend itself to some wonderful moments and chaos too. Thirdly, my initial career was that of a teacher but I had never written a main character who was also a teacher because the right storyline to support that teacher’s evolution through the book hadn’t come together until now. The idea of school teachers being openly neurodivergent is not yet common. Wherever possible, I like to write in ‘the silence spaces’. That is, I like to ask whose voice is missing from the usual angles we read about? In this case, Phoenix is a teacher who is late identified as Autistic and who’s grappling with how to get support to do her job in a system that doesn’t yet know how to support her.
What are you hoping the reader will take away from reading your book?
First and foremost, I want my readers to finish feeling like they’ve enjoyed spending time with my characters and have been transported by the story. If they also continue to think about those things, and think deeply about issues after closing the book, then that’s a bonus for me.
How did you think of the title of the book?
Interesting question! I honestly can’t tell you where the name Phoenix Rose or the title came from. I have no memory of that moment at all. Normally, I write books with a working title that changes somewhere along the way, often several times over before publication, and I think I assumed this one would change too. But as it turned out, it is the first one I’ve written where the title arrived first and the rest followed on all the way to the end.
What’s some great advice you’ve received that has helped you as a writer?
Do one thing that scares you as an author in every book. Each of my books has presented me with different challenges and sometimes they were so challenging that I wanted shred the manuscript and start over. But that little piece of advice reminds me that it is a good thing to feel discomfort when writing, that it is an opportunity to stretch into areas I might otherwise want to avoid, and this keeps me honest and growing as a writer. Leaning into that fear can be a good thing.
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