Perth author Tess Woods talks new book The Venice Hotel and inaugural Festival of Fiction at ECU Joondalup

Tess Woods wakes up every day wondering what she might accidentally do next, given the physiotherapist and mother-of-two’s unexpected foray into becoming both a published author and director of the inaugural Festival of Fiction. The City of Joondalup resident has also become known in her northern suburbs neighbourhood for running her Little Red Street Library, a street library gifted to Woods for her 50th birthday last year. “If you would have said to me the day before I started writing ‘You’re about to be an author’, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Woods says. “But I had a very vivid dream one night of a story, and the next day, when I woke up, I could not get it out of my head. I had fed my children lunch, and I was doing the dishes, looking out into my backyard when I stopped, grabbed pen and paper, and I started writing. It was Australia Day long weekend in 2009, and I wrote just under 50,000 words with pen and paper in three days before I went back to work. I’d never even written a short story up until then.” The book was Love At First Flight and Woods went on to write two more novels, Beautiful Messy Love and Love And Other Battles, before she burnt herself out with too many life commitments. The exhaustion led to a two-and-a-half-year break from writing. All the while, a story inspired by a family holiday to Venice and subsequent research trip to the lagoon city, sat patiently waiting until she was ready again — the result is The Venice Hotel released in September. “It is a twisty, turny contemporary fiction story,” Woods explains. “The best comparison is to compare it to Liane Moriarty and Nine Perfect Strangers because it has multiple points of view and not everything is as it seems. “It’s these four women who find themselves in a boutique hotel in Venice over the 12 days of Christmas. Over those 12 days, they start off as strangers to each other, but then their lives become very interconnected, and start to unravel. “The book explores what happens in the relationships between these women, and not everyone who checked into the hotel can check out again. Not everyone gets out alive, so it has a mystery at its core.” Beginning as a romance writer, Woods discovered she was more interested in the complexities and nuances of women’s relationships — mothers, daughters, friends — examining how women back each other when the chips are down or when life gets dangerous. “So that’s where my writing has led me now,” she shares. “It is touted as a book club novel. We’ve got book club questions at the back of the book. I think just with the four very different women, everyone will find a woman who they relate to in the story.” It was joining Joondalup community choir for the Joondalup arts festival with a couple of her own girlfriends that led Woods to land the role of Festival of Fiction director, a literary event she suggested to organisers as another cultural community idea. She never imagined she would be asked to run it herself. Tickets for the event at ECU Joondalup on October 19 sold out within a day, with plans already in place to return four times bigger next year, with two auditoriums of panel discussion running concurrently over two days. “I wanted to celebrate popular commercial fiction because I feel like that’s what tends to be snubbed at literary festivals,” she says. “I believe genre fiction is what’s driving the publishing industry and keeping it afloat in this country. So I wanted to really celebrate this popular, commercial fiction and be out and proud about romance and crime.” Tickets are still available for the Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York in conversation with Tess Woods at Joondalup Resort on November 1. Originally set to headline Festival of Fiction, Ferguson rescheduled her appearance out of respect to not coincide with the King Charles III and Queen Camilla royal visit to Australia in October. The Venice Hotel is out now, Penguin, RRP $34.99. Tickets to Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York in conversation with Tess Woods at festivaloffiction.com.au.