This high school teacher turned author shares insights into her love for stories and her debut novel, Henry Hamlet’s Heart, which releases this month.

When you were a high school English teacher, what was your favourite book to teach students and why?

It’s too hard to choose just one favourite, so I’m going to cheat a little and list a few.

I taught Alice Pung’s Laurinda to my grade 10 students at an all-girls’ school, and it was an amazing experience that opened up my eyes to the power that sharing experiences of the recent past can have in informing younger generations.

I love teaching To Kill a Mockingbird because I feel like the first time any of us reads it, our worldview, particularly in terms of social justice, just gets blown wide open. I also like to sprinkle in some of the sequel to really get students thinking critically!

And lastly, anything Shakespeare, really, but especially Macbeth. I was always blown away by students’ responses to the minor characters—Lady Macbeth, Lennox, etc.—and their general hatred of Macbeth!

What surprised you about your first publishing experience?

How nice everyone was! I’m naturally quite self-critical so was a bit fearful of the editing process initially—but from the second I met my editor, Felicity Dunning, I knew I was in fantastic hands. It was a very collaborative, creative, careful process between the two of us and my lovely publisher, Clair Hume, and everyone else on my team. I definitely learned more about what makes a book ‘a book’ through taking Henry Hamlet’s Heart from first draft to final product than I had in my entire life prior!

Henry Hamlet’s Heart is very much a coming-of-age story. What drew you to that idea?

I love the depth of emotion of being sixteen/seventeen/ eighteen and trying to capture that breathless blur of years in fiction. So much goes on socially and academically... Then amidst all that, it’s when people first start to realise who they are and how they see the world.

What is your favourite book in the coming-of-age genre?

If I had to choose just one, my all-time favourite book in the coming-of-age genre is probably Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler. It’s such a lyrical, tender, and incredibly real depiction of a teenaged girl coming into herself, and through her first heartbreak.

...it’s when people first start to realise who they are and how they see the world...

In your book, Henry and his classmates study The Great Gatsby. Can you tell us why you chose this connection?

A few reasons, some of them deliberate and some of them sub-conscious.

In my first year of teaching, the grade twelves were studying Gatsby, and I came across an article called something like ‘A Queer Reading of Nick Carraway.’ It was fascinating, right up my alley, but also incredibly well grounded in textual evidence—so it’s stuck with me ever after!

My favourite aspect of teaching texts has always been encouraging students to explore a variety of different readings of whatever we’re studying, and to search for ways canonical stories may contain nuggets of wisdom that are relevant to their lives. In Henry Hamlet’s Heart, Henry draws parallels between himself and Nick in order to better understand him, as we often do when looking for these connections.

The parallels weren’t even necessarily directly obvious to me in the first draft, but the more I looked at Gatsby—a story of a brilliant but troubled character who everyone sees as outwardly ‘golden’ and impervious to flaws, and the wallflower narrator who sees himself as real only in reference to this great friend of his—the deeper it began to embed itself in the boys’ story. To the point where Henry describes Len’s eyes as green lanterns in one scene!

How did you choose to set the story in Brisbane?

I grew up in Sydney and coastal NSW before relocating to QLD in my teens, so when I moved to Brisbane for university, I just found it quite magical!

I like that it’s a cosy city with a lot of character to it—Queenslander houses, blue-blue skies, Jacaranda trees, cafes. When I was writing the first draft of Henry Hamlet’s Heart, I lived on the north side of the city and worked on the south side (still only a twenty-minute drive, which in itself is somewhat magic when you’re born in Sydney!) so I would drive over bridges and past laneways and bits of the river and think about all the adventures my characters could have.

The book is a real ’00s throwback. Why set it in that era specifically?

There were a couple of reasons. I grew up in the ’00s, and even though it really wasn’t that long ago, I sometimes can’t believe how different things were for
my generation compared to my students’. Queer was still just not an easy thing to be for us.

I felt that setting Henry and Len’s story and experiences in this
era was a way to depict those differences; and then 2008 specifically (the year of Emo) was a way to still have setting-related humour and lightness peeking through.

What’s another YA novel you’ve read recently that you would recommend?

Recently, I loved Anna Whateley’s Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal and Gary Lonesborough’s The Boy From the Mish. Also, Our Year of Maybe by Rachel Lynn Solomon.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

I am, actually! I’m currently working on my second YA novel, a gothic mystery about two sisters who live by the sea with themes of mental illness, queer perspectives, and who gets to write history.