Welcome to the Phoenix Helix podcast with over 200 episodes dedicated to autoimmune resilience.

I'm Elaine Laird, your host, and I am back with a very special episode today.

As you know, if you're a regular listener of this podcast, I retired two years ago, but I chose to keep the episode archive available, and I'm so glad I did because people are still listening.

I see it in the download numbers, and I also hear about it when people reach out to me to let me know the difference it's making in their lives.

And that means so much to me to know that this archive of work has a life beyond me. And so thank you to everyone

is listening, old and new. So why am I back? I published my debut novel, which is called

Celestial River. And this has been a lifelong dream for me. And I wanted to record an episode to take

you behind the scenes and tell you about the novel and the process of writing it because the

Phoenix Helix community was such a big part of my life for so long that you all feel like

friends. When I said goodbye in my retirement podcast, I let you know

I was going to pursue this dream. And I think a lot of you will be curious about how that unfolded.

And I just want to share it with you. So I have invited my friend Joanna Francom to join me in this

conversation. So it's not just going to be me talking at you.

She is a fellow autoimmune warrior who many of you know already.

She's been featured on this podcast in episodes 18, 77, and 206.

She's a good friend of mine, and you will recognize her voice instantly because she's from New Zealand so her voice sounds like music.

So let's dive into this conversation.

Joine. Joanna, my friend, just feels like going back in time. It's so fun to be recording a podcast with you again. I'm so grateful. It's so lovely to be here. Well, we're going to have a back and forth conversation. But for our listeners, we're going to start off a little formally.

What Joanna's going to do for you is she's going to read basically with the back cover copy of the book.

So you can, in a nutshell, know what this book is about, and then we'll dive in from

there.

So, Joanna, are you up for reading it?

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