Goodreads asked Jo Chumas:

How do you get inspired to write?

Jo Chumas I think my inspiration - my burning desire to write - stems from being a deeply introverted person. Without writing, I would be voiceless and that's very scary. I grew up in a household where having a voice wasn't really part of things. Being a girl I was not supposed to have a voice. It was the era of female invisibility. I was a third daughter. I always think of my father as Don Draper - the character from the US hit TV series Mad Men. I adored him but he was rarely around. There was never much opportunity to express myself verbally in my house, so I wrote down my thoughts and this became my default way of being. The same applies today. I am burning to express myself but writing things down is my default position. Novel writing is about expressing the fears, desires and thoughts I have. For example in my novel After Rafaela, I wanted to write about the grief I still feel at the passing of my beloved sister. I also had a very close friend - my best friend - who left me years ago. We were exceptionally close. In writing After Rafaela I wanted to deal with these feelings of loss, of insecurity, of feeling voiceless, of feeling overwhelmed by anger and grief at how life turns out sometimes. One reviewer picked up beautifully my message in this novel. He said the novel was about the precariousness and uncertainty of life in our times. So true! After Rafaela is a novel which hopefully describes the insecurity of our lives, the way things can turn out for us and how basically we have little control over things. But there's positive things in all this. The novel has a happy ending. I always hope for that, for everyone.

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