Interviews with Creatives | Author, dance teacher & choreographer Lorena Otes on writing memoir

In this interview, I chat with Northern Beaches debut memoirist Lorena Otes on writing memoir, 13 rounds of IVF, why she wrote 100 words a day for a year, and what a ballroom dancing novel has to do with getting unstuck

This is part of the Interviews with Creatives series, a curated library of conversations from the Creative Momentum with Meg podcast.

Lorena Otes is a Sydney-based author, dance teacher, choreographer and single mother by choice whose debut memoir Solo Mum by Choice was published by Hawkeye Publishing in May 2026. Her memoir traces her journey through 13 rounds of IVF as a solo mum, told with the same quality that defines her approach to life generally: curiosity, humour and a refusal to let the hard stuff go unexamined.

Lorena has a degree in choreography and contemporary dance, spent 15 years working in retail and came back to writing the way she came back to dance: because it turns out you never really leave the things that are home to you. She is one of those guests who makes you feel that a creative life is

not one thing but everything, all at once, and that is exactly what this conversation is about.

Whether you are navigating a creative dry spell, looking for permission to keep writing even when your manuscript has to go on hold, or just wanting to hear from someone who genuinely lives creatively across multiple forms, this episode will give you that and more. Lorena is funny, generous and completely unafraid of the big stuff.

Listen or watch the podcast interview

Lorena Otes – Author, Dance Teacher & Choreographer

IIntroduction

LO: My name’s Lorena Oates, I’m an author. My memoir, Solo Mum by Choice, just came out last month. I’m also a dance teacher and choreographer, and I’m a mum, and all those things come together in crazy and weird ways.

MD: Beautiful. I love that there’s multiple parts of you, and I think this is for probably most creatives, that we’re not just creative in one way or another. Can you tell me, were you writing before you wrote your memoir, or was that your first time trying your hand at writing.

LO: Always writing. I’ve got a suitcase full of journals under my bed. So, I was always writing, was always going to be a writer. After my HSC, I got into communications at uni and didn’t do it. I deferred for a year to do ballet instead. Then my career ended up going more along that path. And, not as a ballet dancer, contemporary dance. Then, with the memoir, I got back into it. I was writing the memoir and, as I was going, I thought I’m really enjoying this creative process, and how can I, you know, write more and write different things, and also expand my CV? Because I thought I need to, you know, something… so I started writing short stories and articles and things as well, so I guess that tips back into the journalism thing from way back a little as well, so yeah, I love it. It’s a really different form of expression to creating movement and dance, and but I guess we’ll delve into that as well, probably a little bit.

MD: So, are you writing fiction now, or…

LO: I’ve got a really messy draft in my computer that I’m dying to get back to, but because it’s only been a month since the release of my book, I’m doing snippets. It’s a women’s fiction novel set in a ballroom dancing studio. It’s two worlds coming together, which again, is just delicious. It’s got a bit of drama, it’s got a bit of crime, and a little bit of romance, but I wouldn’t put it in any of those genres. It’s just got little bits of everything happening in there. And I’m really excited about it. And I also have two children’s books in my computer. At the moment, and they’re junior fiction, so around my daughter’s age, six to nine years old. The protagonists are a little bit like Billie B. Brown. The protagonist is a double donor child, a little bit like my daughter, which means she was made from a sperm donor and egg donor, but that’s not really the main thing, that’s just a sort of a side thing. I really want my daughter to be able to see herself in a main character in a book, and I think there’s a lot of kids like that. Those stories are also done, but need a lot of work

Creative Routine

MD: Can you tell me a little bit about your routine for your creative work? And I’d also like to know, have you borrowed anything from your dancing routine to take into the writing.

LO: I’m quite lucky because I freelance as a dance teacher, so I’m not 9 to 5. I’m not required for a lot of hours, in terms of the 9-5 thing. I get a lot of time at home. At the moment, my daughter’s at school, and I have all day today to write until I go and teach tonight. Then I go and be creative in the dance studio, and jump around and I find that really,  really fulfilling. So, I’m lucky in terms of dancing feeding my writing. I’m not very good at sitting still for long times, so sometimes I’ll just get up and do some preparation for my classes in the middle of writing something. I’ve got space behind me, and I’ll just create some exercises, and then come and sit back down again and continue writing, just to get moving, because I don’t sit still for a long time in front of the computer. Having said that I had some feedback from my publisher for my memoir and she asked me to create a whole new part three for my memoir. And I sat down for hours, five or six hours at a time, writing about a thousand words an hour. So, when you’re really in the zone, when it’s all happening, and you’ve got a bit of pressure on you? Ugh, I thrive with that.

MD: There you go, guys.

LO: Yeah, so that’s how they sort of complement each other, and creatively my mind is always spinning. I’m always coming up with movement when I’m driving the car to work, and now that’s peppered with coming up with words. It’s hard when you come up with words or movement when you’re just about to fall asleep, or when you’re driving in the car. You’ve got to pull over, or you’ve got to wake up and write it down. They go hand in hand like that, I think. I love that.

MD: Has the routine changed for your writing since your book has come out?

LO: It definitely has because I just don’t have the time to do as much creative writing. I’m marketing at the moment and doing a lot of … I mean, I got myself on TV. But for an interview, I don’t know if you saw it, but that involved a lot of sitting at the computer and sending out emails until it finally landed with the right person. So ,if you think of that, that’s one arm of what I’ve been doing since the book came out. There’s all the different things that I’m trying to do. I printed off some pamphlets and I now need to go out and hand those out in medical centres. So I just don’t have the time to sit and write. What I do, in terms of maintaining that creativity until I do have those hours in front of the computer again is enter quite a few short story competitions and 500-word short story competitions like Furious Fiction from the Australian Writer’s Centre which I every month. I also do the Not Quite Write Prize, I do that every month, and there’s a few others. Because that forces me to sit down polish the prose, write the prose. I would never hand in something I’m not happy with so I put the hours in and it keeps that side of my brain really active and hungry to get into my manuscripts that are sitting in my computer, rather than time just disappearing.

MD: The admin side of being a writer feels quite different to that creative part of the brain, doesn’t it?

LO: It is so crazy and you’ve got to be a little bit extroverted. You’ve got to turn up to events, and, here I am and you’ve got a microphone, and you’re speaking to people and you’re sitting at your computer, and you’re writing emails to try and get people to share your excitement for your creative work, my memoir. You’re doing all this different stuff, you’re not pouring your heart out on the page, you’re trying to get other people to understand why you poured your heart out onto the page, and that’s very different. It’s a bit like writing a synopsis versus writing the prose. It’s just so much more clinical, but so necessary.

MD: Yeah. I was gonna say, but it’s so necessary. We have to put in the hours to do that work.

LO: Surprisingly, I don’t dislike it. I feel quite satisfied. I sit there and I really believe in my product, and I think no one’s going to believe in your work more than you do, even if you’re not confident. I really believe that this book needs to get into the hands of certain people, but I also believe it’s a global memoir with global kind of themes, so I’m like, why wouldn’t you want it to try and get it into the hands of people and try and share the excitement that I have for it, if that makes sense.

MD: Absolutely, absolutely makes sense. And, Solo Mum by Choice, I’m so glad that you’ve got this memoir out there. One of my cousins decided to become a mum by choice as well. Actually, she inspired one of my characters in one of my stories, so…

LO: Yeah, okay.

MD: Yeah, because you’re looking at those kind of motherhood, themes, I’m always quite interested in.

Creative Process

MD: Can you tell me a little bit about your creative process? So, how do you go from idea to pulling it together.

LO: Okay, so for my memoir because it wasn’t fiction, I went through two rounds of IVF, and I had this idea that something interesting was going on, and it wasn’t a common sort of IVF story. There was more to it. There was the solo mum aspect, there was the fact that I like to put humour into things, and I thought, some really funny things are happening, and I can lighten the load with this. And I thought, why don’t I just start writing it down? Because, you know, this isn’t just, and then I went to the doctor, and da-da-da-da-da. This is like I walked out of a dance class and tripped over and broke my foot, kind of funny, you know? There’s stuff like that that just happened all the way through. Obviously, fiction’s a bit different. So, when I’d finished my memoir, and I’d had my publishing deal and everything like that, I then decided it was safe to kind of get into working on my fiction. And I was writing away based on my own experiences, and the main character was loosely based on me, and then I thought, hang on a sec. This doesn’t have to be true, and I can go off into these tangents and it was really fun. Sometimes I went too far and had to pull myself back in a little bit because it still has to be believable. I created an antagonist character, which in my memoir I did have because there was a few antagonists, but it was more the IVF and the situation itself that was the antagonist. So, and I got craft books, and I was writing with Save the Cat Writes a Novel. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. So I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants, and I am a bit of a pantser, I’ve found out, but I also loved that freedom. It was also a little bit intimidating as well.

MD: Yeah. I’m just gonna define what a pantser is, because I have had some people who are not writers saying to me, what is a pantser? So, I’m gonna say, for those listening who are curious about what a pantser is. It is people who are writing by the seat of their pants, basically, and writing, as the words come out. I actually think it’s a spectrum of going from a complete pantser who literally just sits down and just writes to a complete plotter who maps the entire thing out, scene by scene, before they start.

LO: Spreadsheets, there’s spreadsheets.

MD: Yeah, yeah. And there’s everything in between. So, for those listening who are wondering what a pantser is, there it is.

LO: Yeah. And I’d say, I think you’re right spot on with the spectrum thing, because I’d say I’m not a complete pantser. I definitely have ideas, and I think most people do. I’d love to see what happened if I just sat there and things came to me I think that’d be bit dangerous, but yeah, there’s definitely a spectrum.

Where are you on that spectrum?

MD: I am close to the complete panther, but I do like to have a skeleton of having an idea of what it is. My historical that is currently being looked at by some people, it started with the skeleton, basically, and so I just put the flesh on the bones. And probably a bit like Sophie Stern, for those who listened to Sophie’s episode, as I’m going, I use my spreadsheets to then kind of keep an eye on what’s going on, with word count, and where I think the arc in the story is, and making sure that I’m bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up, until… So, yes.

LO: It’s funny you mention Sophie Stern, because she’s another Debut Crew member, and her novel What is Left for Us is fantastic. She’s a massive spreadsheet fan, and when you were talking about that and I said spreadsheets, she was who I had in mind, so it’s so funny you mentioned her. She’s amazing.

MD: We did riff a little bit about spreadsheets in our conversation (Season 2, Episode 15)

LO: I haven’t heard that episode yet, but it’s next after Cassie’s.

MD: Yeah, pretty much my entire life is in a spreadsheet. So, you know, I’m a big believer in the spreadsheet. I just think it’s a tool that we get to use.

LO: It is. It’s great. I love it.

Creative Inspiration

MD: From who, what, or where do you get your inspiration for your creative work? Obviously, you were inspired by your own journey for your memoir. But say for short stories, or the fiction you’re now writing, or maybe even your dance as well, what are the things that inspire you?

LO: It’s hard sometimes to get inspiration. I spent all of last year writing, writing a 100-word story every single day, because of all these, competitions that I do, they give you word prompts, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with something. Sometimes the prompts are so obscure. You just think, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this. I’ve got to set it on a football field, like, I don’t like football, what am I going to do with that? So it sort of inspires you to come up with something that might be something different that could happen on a football field. It doesn’t have to be during a game, it could be a tour of Wembley Stadium or something. So things can come to you that way. So I did that to bank some ideas, which I find really helpful.

I get inspiration from my daughter. Sometimes she’s six and we see things that you don’t see in usual life with a child who’s under ten, I think. She’s always picking up objects, flowers, sticks and stones. We spent two hours at the beach the other day, she was covered in sand, and then we went on a Ferris Wheel. That kind of thing, to me is just … there’s so many things that you could draw from just that very simple moment. I sat there, I was having coffee with a friend and then they had to go, and I sat there while she played for an hour, and I just watched her, and my mind just wandered. I was watching a seagull. This is really weird. I was watching a seagull flat out toward the ocean, and I was trying to watch it for as far as it would go, wondering where it was going and where it was going to end up. There’s a story, you know, or part of a story. There’s an inspiration for a story. So I think, at the moment, I’m really lucky, because life is rich in that way. My dad’s a writer and he edited my book, and I get a lot of inspiration from him. Shout out to my dad. I’m always learning from him.

In terms of dance, I get a lot of inspiration from music and I actually teach choreography streams. I have a degree in choreography and contemporary dance, and we learnt, and I’m still encouraging my students, to find inspiration in art, in everyday things, in the formation of clouds, just to look around. I used to have a book that I wrote it all in, so I’m just always looking for little snippets of inspiration that can bloom into something more, which sounds really cheesy when I say it like that, but I think if you actually sit down and put pressure on yourself, you can’t do it. You have to find this stuff when you’re not ready for it.

MD: I love that. And I also think that children are fantastic because they are just so curious, and at some point, we decide we’re not going to be curious, or we’re going to be grown-ups and adult-like, but I think when we go back to that childlike curiosity, there’s inspiration everywhere.

LO: I know, I know. When we had COVID and we were in lockdown, and my daughter was one or two, she was really little, and we would just wander up to the front of our place in our pyjamas every day and chat to the neighbours, and there was succulents growing, there was, all these little flowers and beautiful little structures that I would never have noticed otherwise. We watched sunflowers grow from a seed. It sounds so boring, but it was all so beautiful and inspiring, and it just unlocks something in you, I think.

MD: Yeah, yeah, I think so too. My kids are young adults now, but I do remember those years. How they would just look at a leaf for a long time. And that invitation for us as creatives is what would that look like if we started kind of having that curiosity and finding a life, and just really looking at it.

LO: And in autumn, collecting different shades of leaves, and just those things.

Creative Wisdom

MD: Yeah, yeah. Tell me, if you were to be having a chat with someone who, is either new to creative work, whether that’s writing or dancing or whatever, or someone who is, I guess, stuck, what wisdom would you want to share with them?

LO: We all get stuck and I think the best advice I’ve ever been given, and the advice I would hand on, would be very much to pull back into your immediate world, and to use a cliche, take one step at a time. This is a good example.

When I was writing my memoir, I didn’t know how it was going to end, so I was doing a writing course with a fantastic woman called Bernadette Foley. I don’t know if you know her. I was just a bit of a mess. I was having failed IVF rounds, I had this book, I knew I had something, I didn’t know if I was going to become a mum or not, because I was only in the middle of my 13-round saga of IVF, and she saw that look in my eyes.

She said:

You need to put it down for a little while but don’t put down your creativity. Keep your creativity. My advice is to just sit at your computer for 10 minutes a day, no more, no less. Open up your computer, your new fiction. Have 10 minutes of play every day, put your computer down at exactly 10 minutes.

And that just ended up being really hard to do. I didn’t want to put it down after 10 minutes, but I followed her advice. Then I was bursting to get back on it and write my 10 minutes worth, and I would write 500 words in 10 minutes because I’d been thinking about it, and it got me through a really rough writing patch.

That exact advice might not work for everybody, but just taking little snippets, open up your computer, write a sentence, close it down again, put a pen to paper and draw a sketch. Doesn’t have to be good, just do it. If you’re an artist. If you’re a creative and a dancer, you don’t have to go into the studio to create. You can, you know, do a little bit of movement out in an oval.

 Sometimes when my daughter’s playing, I might—I probably look really weird—but I might just do a bit of movement, just to feel my body moving in the space of the outdoors. So, it may sound a little bit hocus-pocus, but I think those little things are what get us to the bigger things, which is obvious, but when you’re in a rut, you don’t see that, and you just think, everyone else has a book out, and everyone’s successful, and everyone’s doing this, and I’m the only one that’s not published, but you know, we’ve all been there.

MD: I love that so much because I love play, and I think  it’s also giving yourself permission to play, which again once we become serious adults, we stop playing. Let’s play again, but also time-box it. You’ve only got 10 minutes, and in this 10 minutes that’s all you’re gonna do. Just play.

LO: It makes you so desperate to do more when you’ve got a time limit becausewhen you’ve got all the time in the world, that’s when you start doing the dishes, and you start doing this and this, but when you’re in that creative slump, when you don’t have all the time in the world, and you’re almost being told you’ve got to do your 10 minutes today, it’s nearly bedtime, or something like that, you’re a bit like, either, ugh, I better do it, or I’ve got all these ideas, and I’ve only got 10 minutes to get them out, so.

MD: I love that. And did it unlock … obviously it unlocked that story.

LO: Yeah, so I did that for a long time, actually. I did the 10 minutes a day for a long time and then I got back to the memoir. I think I just needed to get out of that slump, and I took a while from the memoir. I think I took a couple of years, actually, from memory.  I needed to stop, and I needed to just focus … I took notes. Every time I went to the doctor, I’d have this notebook, but I just didn’t write it until after. And I think I’d done a fair whack of the fiction. I’d done about  30,000 words, I think. Which I changed all of it, but that didn’t matter, because it was there.

MD: I think that’s also great wisdom as well, to know when to put the manuscript down for a bit.  And that it’s okay. It takes as long as it takes. It’s not a race. It’s not a race to make things.

Home for Creativity

MD: Tell me, what feels like home for you and your creative work, Lorena?

LO: Do you know, there’s nothing like walking into a dance studio and seeing the ballet barre. That’s my home. In terms of dancing. I just walk in and I’m home. It’s been my home since I was five years old, so that, to me, is home.

In terms of creative writing, I do love how the whole day just goes when I’m sitting on my computer in the zone. So I’m really desperate to get back to writing again, because it feels strange to say being at home is on my computer. I don’t think it’s being on my computer, I think it’s being inside my story, inside the computer.  Because I get lost in time and space in a way that I don’t anywhere else. It’s really weird. I’ve just discovered that in the last five years. Writing my memoir became a bit of a task in the end, because there was so much editing that needed to be done, and it’s so difficult to step back from your own story.  But when you’re sitting there creating, I think it’s really different, and I feel very at home in that space but that wasn’t my first answer, was it?

MD: No, but it’s okay to have more than one thing that feels like home.

LO: Now, my daughter, of course, feels like home, but that’s a little bit different. She’s inspiring in different ways

MD: You have these different kind of creative parts of you, so I love that walking into that room and seeing the barre.

LO: Yeah, it’s funny because I took a few years away from the dance world. I actually ended up in retail. I was a manager at Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus, believe it or not, and then an ABC shop so I’ve actually been a bookseller as well. And I was in that space for a good 15 years, probably 10 of which I hadn’t entered a dance studio. So walking back in after all that time into a ballroom dance studio, and I was like, where’s the barre? There was no ballet barre and I was like, this isn’t a dance studio. And then I started doing, ballet again, and getting back into that. And it is a dance studio, of course, it doesn’t need the ballet barre but that, to me represents my story.

MD: When you’re doing dancing, maybe not teaching it so much, because I’m sure you’re focused on the students and the class but when you are doing dancing, do ideas for story come up for you now?

LO: I don’t do classes anymore. When I’m dancing, it’s usually improv, and I usually do it when there’s no students around. I usually switch on some music and do a little bit of improv before they come in, or after they’ve gone just if I feel like I need to get something out. Yeah, I don’t feel like stories come, but I feel like there’s a sort of an unlocking of pathways, if that makes sense.

MD: Absolutely.

LO: Yeah, and with music, if the right music’s on and I’m connected to that music, then there’s just something that happens that definitely changes the way I write. So, and I kind of need to do that fairly regularly, even if, like I said to you before, it’s just around the house. I’m often just down the hallway here, just doing a bit of movement, put on some music, you know, that kind of thing. But I tell you what else helped, and you might be interested in this. When I was going through all the IVF and then writing the memoir, dance was one of my crutches during that time as well. So when things are hard for me, in terms of trying to get a book published isn’t that dissimilar to doing round after round of IVF because you’re just getting knockback after knockback. Unfortunately, we can’t take you on at this time. Unfortunately, you’re not pregnant at this time. Dance has been my constant through all of this.  Having a memoir published as an unknown memoirist is really hard, so I’m aware I’m in a really lucky position. Thank you to Hawkeye for taking me on because they really believe in championing, Australian voices like mine, and I’m lucky I found them, and they found me. But with dance, I go in and I teach my students. I can put on any music I like because I teach contemporary.  And I might have just been sitting in the gutter out the back of the studio, and I’ve just found out that I’m not pregnant again, and I’m crying, and then I go into the studio and ta-da, here I am. Put on a fake: Hi guys, let’s mark the roll! How are you all today? And then the music comes on and we do exercises, and even though I’m in teaching mode. I can feel myself healing, and that’s been part of the writing process as well, because there’s a lot of rejection, and it’s not all happy, fluffy bunnies, and getting edited is hard. You know what structural edits are like? It’s like a knife to the heart sometimes, because you think you’ve done something really well, and they’re like, no, this section shouldn’t be in here at all. And you’re like, oh, okay. I thought it was really compelling, and it’s not. So dance has been a constant through that.

MD: Do you find now that writing becomes a salve in the same way, or not?

LO: Yeah, definitely. I’ve written a lot of articles that are very personal. I actually wrote one for COPE, Centre of Perinatal Excellence, about what it was like to do the 13 rounds of IVF. Arianne Beeston who is their Communications Manager is amazing, by the way. It was quite personal and it was quite cathartic to get that out. In the dancing world there’s been a body image thing in my life as well, and I’ve written quite a few, fictional stories, and also a non-fiction, a true story, based around that, which has been really good, because I think we need to talk about things like that more, so I find a catharsis in writing even fiction based on true story. I have a short story in the Brussels Review, at the moment, which is based on a moment. It’s called One Momentary Flicker, and it’s based on a moment where my daughter and I were sitting at a bus stop in, Newtown, and  a woman sat next to us, and we started chatting, and it turns out she had  this incredible story, and she walked away after hearing my story, becoming, you know, a solo mum by choice, with this seed planted, that maybe that’s something that she might think about doing, given her horrendous history that she told me in snippets when my daughter wasn’t listening, because it was quite, quite traumatic. And I wrote that out in fiction form. We’re so lucky as writers to be able to do that, and to have people that want to listen to what we have to say, because when it’s really important like that, and it’s giving people hope and giving messages, and it comes from a really true, authentic place, that is  just… ugh. It’s really incredible to be able to do that, and to be able to be given the skill to do it well. I’m lucky … we’re lucky as writers that we have this kind of ability to do that as well, because not everyone expresses themselves in different ways, and it will be different in dance form. I wouldn’t be able to tell that story in dance form in the same way. So, yeah, in that way the creative processes can be quite different.

MD: Thank you for sharing that, and I think it is good to remember that, as writers we get to tell stories, to help other people be able to process things in their lives.

LO: And make them laugh as well about the situation, maybe, because if you can laugh, I mean there’s a lot of things that aren’t funny, and often with laughter, there’s someone that suffers. I try to make that me a lot of the time, that person, the victim of the humour, for want of a better word, because sometimes you’ve just got to laugh at yourself, and you can teach people that as well, or not teach them, but just show them that’s like a coping mechanism. It’s not for everybody, but sometimes it might lighten the load for people as well.

MD: Yeah, yep, because even in the darkest time, there is still humour.

LO: Gotta be. Not in that moment necessarily, but you’ve got to step out eventually and just think, what was that?

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