In many ways, FATHER TRINITY is my story – in Jackie’s experience of racism, Flash and Ace’s experience of losing a child, and my trying to bring up Jackie to not be Blade.

I started fostering the son of a dominating man 8 weeks before the pandemic hit. As I raise him, I constantly question: How does a sensitive boy become the toxic male we loathe? How do I shape him to be better than his father? When I picked him up from soccer after being hurt, his coach said “No tears!”

Having experienced the blackness of losing my first son, I reflected upon the impact such a loss would have on a man brought up with the mantra “No tears”.

As a person of color, I’ve found that people think you are seeing racism that isn’t there, because they don’t see it. I wanted to show that the demons of racism and loss are real, to those experiencing them, by anthropomorphizing them.

Currently there is a surging anti-Asian racism borne of the pandemic, men assaulting unconscious women at parties and in parliament and an inability to deal with death, particularly that of a child. There is a global, chronic lack of empathy. This story brings all these elements together.

I used a short story and short screenplay – a quarterfinalist in the Page Awards – as the basis of Boneyard, which I wrote in three days. It was a story that needed urgently to be told.

PHOENIX BLACK is a former aidworker who became a single foster mom during the pandemic. She writes genre benders about personal chaos and adventure, at the intersection of racism, identity and loss, told from the perspective of a woman of color with a disability. Phoenix currently lives in Sydney and is the daughter of one of Australia’s first dozen immigrants of color. Phoenix is inspired by her muse, Keanu Reeves, and her foster son, who thinks he is a dragon. Neither of them does the dishes.